Billy Hinchen

My PhD is focussed upon using the amphipod crustacean, Parhyale hawaiensis, as an alternative model organism to study early arthropod development. Parhyale are especially amenable to lab conditions and a range of classical embryological techniques, such as microinjection for lineage tracing and blastomere isolation experiments. The first transgenic lines have also been successfully established here in the Cambridge labs.

My research is at present to understand the control of early cell movements in the pre-morphogenetic movement stages of development. I want to investigate to what extent are particular cellular migrations and movements either dependent upon local neighbouring cells, or entirely autonomous in nature. Firstly, I am using the cell tracking software, SIMIBiocell, coupled with extensive 4D microscopy techniques to establish a highly detailed description of wild type development. The 4D microscopy is performed using an upright compound microscope with a cold light source. Upon completeion of this I will conduct systematic single cell ablations at the 8-cell stage (S4) to build up a complete picture of either the autonomy or independent nature of cellular movements.

This work is being carried out at the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge. However, from July I will based at the OEB, Harvard University.

• Shrimp in action: time-lapse movie (QuickTime .mov file: 3.7 MB, 25 seconds)

  'Dorsal' view of the embryo at S4 (the 8-cell stage) displaying the 4 micromeres sitting on top of the 4 larger macromeres. The micromeres are, from top right, clockwise: g (germ cell), mr (right mesoderm), en (endoderm) and ml (left mesoderm). The underlying macromeres, in the same order are: Mav (anterior and visceral mesoderm), Er (right ectoderm), Ep (posterior ectoderm) and El (left ectoderm). Anterior-posterior axis is approximately 45 degree off center, to the right, of the long axis; anterior is at the top, posterior at the bottom. These cell identities are based on lineage analyses carrier out by Gerberding et al. (2002).