Grant: Undergraduate: Mobility, musculoskeletal health and arthritis - ICS

Intramembranous bone forms differently than endochondral bone and for this reason it may also respond differently to injury and diseases in later life. The work we have done leading up to this proposal discovered the Pannexn 3 is expressed in early ossifying intramembranous bones and the hypertrophic zone of endochondral bone in mouse and chicken. This gene codes for a tiny pore in the membrane of cells called a hemichannel and it is likely that the main function of PANX3 involves bone formation. In this application the student will explore the requirement for PANX3 in intramembranous bone formation by increasing or decreasing the number of Pannexin 3 hemichannels in chicken embryos. Two avian-specific viruses have been engineered, one of which will express the PANX3 gene and the other of which will decrease gene expression. The student will inject these viruses into 2.5 day chicken embryos and reincubated the eggs until the bones have formed. The effects on the skull bones will be analyzed to see whether there is extra or reduced bone. The significance of the work is that these channels usually transport small molecules or ions such as ATP/cAMP or Ca++, and finding ways to increase or decrease the abundance of these channels could one day lead to new therapies for diseases affecting bone and cartilage formation.