Nathan Lawson
Credentials: Dermatology
Position title: Vascular development in the zebrafish
Email: nathan.lawson@umassmed.edu
Address:
Arriving at UW in January 2027.
LAB WEBSITE:
FOCUS GROUPS:
Developmental Biology & Regenerative Medicine, Transcriptional Mechanisms, Systems Biology
RESEARCH DESCRIPTION:
I have an extensive history of using genetic approaches to discover novel cellular and molecular mechanisms required for blood vessel growth. Much of my work has focused on using the zebrafish as a model system and my early efforts as a postdoc leveraged genetic approaches to identify a novel pathway required for specifying arterial and venous endothelial fates during embryonic development. During that time I also developed the first zebrafish transgenic line that enabled direct visualization of cellular dynamics of endothelial cells in vivo through application of time lapse analysis.
In early studies in my own lab, we continued to apply genetic approaches coupled with time lapse analysis in zebrafish embryos to reveal novel mechanisms of cell coordination during developmental angiogenesis. We continue to apply these approaches to analyze angiogenesis and lymphatic vessel development in multiple embryonic contexts. More recently, we have leveraged both molecular and genetic approaches to analyze the development of pericytes, a type of vascular mural cell that regulates capillary function. In parallel to these efforts, we have a long history of developing
computational and molecular biology resources that have improved the zebrafish as a genetic model and have benefited the zebrafish community. These efforts include an extensive experience in genome editing: generation of the first zebrafish knockout lines, optimization of alternative CRISPR approaches, including Cas12a and prime editors, optimizing conditions for targeted knock-in, and developing pipelines to generate zebrafish bearing floxed alleles. We have also made collections of plasmid reagents to facilitate zebrafish transgenesis, while developing computational pipelines and transcriptome annotations, all of which are widely used by the zebrafish community.