Congratulations to Dr. Nic Janto, who defended his PhD in the GMB Program at Emory earlier this week! Nic is headed off to postdoc with Edan Foley at The University of Bath. It’s the end of an era for the lab, but very excited to follow Nic’s journey into zebrafish models of intestinal biology! 🐟

Excited for a packed day of science at the inaugural Cholestatic Liver Disease Summit!

CONGRATS to @hannahhrncir.bsky.social, who successfully defended her PhD on Friday! 🥳 A major milestone for the lab and a tour de force of liver research from Dr. Hrncir. Her next stop is the Caron Lab at UNC (@unc-cbp.bsky.social). Very proud of all Hannah accomplished in a short 5yrs!

Among all the bad news about science, I had to share some beautiful new imaging of the mouse liver from @hannahhrncir.bsky.social in my lab. CEACAM1 (red) and Sox9EGFP (green).

No freeze on fun! Taking a little break from the chaos for an overdue lab holiday dinner. It’s a good time to be grateful for getting to work with such a hardworking and dedicated group of scientists. Truly the best part of the job!

New lab decor, courtesy of @hannahhrncir.bsky.social and @kkanak.bsky.social !
Most of the meme references had to be explained to me 👴🏻🫠

To directly test the requirement of aISC survival in organoid survival, we used the Lgr5-2A-DTR allele from Nick Barker's lab to ablate residual aISCs after DXR. Sure enough, organoid survival drops to 0 even at lower doses of DXR... 4/x

What we didn't expect was that some aISCs from before injury appear to survive an initial "pulse" of DXR. Through some imaging and flow experiments (including using Sox9EGFP+ organoids), our data suggested that organoids can't survive DXR if they lose all of their aISCs... 3/x

the tldr; is that we can model active ISC (aISC) damage and facultative ISC (fISC) gene activation with doxorubicin (DXR) in organoids. Not surprising because DXR is known to target aISC in vivo... 2/x