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Tfap2b, a pivotal transcription factor, plays critical roles within neural crest cells and their derived lineage. To unravel the intricate lineage dynamics and contribution of these Tfap2b+ cells during craniofacial development, we established a Tfap2b-CreER^T2 knock-in transgenic mouse line using the CRISPR-Cas9-mediated homologous direct repair. By breeding with tdTomato reporter mice and initiating Cre activity through tamoxifen induction at distinct developmental time points, we show the Tfap2b lineage within the key neural crest-derived domains, such as the facial mesenchyme, midbrain, cerebellum, spinal cord, and limbs. Notably, the migratory neurons stemming from the dorsal root ganglia are visible subsequent to Cre activity initiated at E8.5. Intriguingly, Tfap2b+ cells, serving as the progenitors for limb development, show activity predominantly commencing at E10.5. Across the mouse craniofacial landscape, Tfap2b exhibits a widespread presence throughout the facial organs. Here we validate its role as a marker of progenitors in tooth development and have confirmed that this process initiates from E12.5. Our study not only validates the Tfap2b-CreER^T2 transgenic line, but also provides a powerful tool for lineage tracing and genetic targeting of Tfap2b-expressing cells and their progenitor in a temporally and spatially regulated manner during the intricate process of development and organogenesis.

Watching documentaries as a child, I became fascinated by how genomes encode the instructions to make all the cells of an organism. I studied Biochemistry at Oxford University as the subject seemed to provide a mechanistic understanding of living systems. During my time at Oxford, I completed my part II thesis (similar to a master's project) in Prof. Doug Higgs' lab. I learned about the regulation of gene expression during development of blood cells and the disease ATRX which causes alpha thalassemia and neurological defects in patients via misregulation of gene expression. While we were studying the effects of this disease on gene expression within the blood system, I wondered if studying both the blood and the brain may help find generalizable principles and mechanisms driving the disease. For this reason, I wanted to do my Ph.D. in a system where I could study many different types of cells. I decided to work with stem cells and transcription factors involved in the specification of cell fate.

I did my Ph.D. at Imperial College London at the MRC London Medical Sciences Center with Dr. Meng Li. I studied how midbrain dopaminergic neurons are made in developing mouse and chick brains and applied this knowledge to stem cells to create dopaminergic neurons in a dish. The hope was that these stem cell-derived dopaminergic neurons would serve as a platform for drug screening and therapeutic approaches for patients with Parkinson's disease. While I value the stem cell system, at the time, it was not the ideal system to explore how genomes encode gene expression in time and space. My stem cell cultures were often heterogenous; a mixture of neural-like cells and other cells, most commonly cardiac cells beating in the dish. And one could never truly know if the cells in the dish recapitulated the endogenous dopaminergic neurons. Through my research experiences, I thought that experimental approaches in whole developing embryos would be better suited for understanding how our genomes encode the instructions for making an organism. I set about looking for a system in which I could study enhancers in high-throughput within whole developing organisms.

Prof. Mike Levine spoke about Ciona at a British Society of Developmental Biology meeting, and I was hooked. I realized that Ciona, with its close relation to vertebrates and the power of electroporation to incorporate plasmids into millions of embryos, would be an ideal organism for whole embryo high-throughput reporter assays to study enhancers. Thus, Ciona is an ideal system to decipher how the instructions for development are encoded in our genomes.

I started my postdoc with Prof. Mike Levine in 2012. I developed a synthetic enhancer library screen (SEL-seq) to test many millions of enhancers for activity in developing Ciona (Figure 1a). I used SEL-Seq to test 2.5 million variants of a neural Otx-a enhancer to examine how this enhancer activated by two pleiot

The search for female scientists who pioneered the research on tunicates is hindered by the tradition of reporting only the first initials of authors' names on scientific publications using only the initials of their first names. While this practice has the theoretical merit of broadening the readership by preventing the possible bias that could be caused by the gender of the author(s) in some of the readers, it rendered the identification of female researchers active in, or before, the first half of the 20th century quite challenging. Sifting through several dozen electronic records, and with the help of references and/or quotes found online, we have stitched together the information that we were able to retrieve on the life of female scientists who authored some of the earliest publications on tunicates, and we have organized them in (approximate) chronological order. We have also compiled brief synopses of the findings of scientists active in the field of tunicate biology in more recent times, and organized them by subdiscipline.