So Billie what is your specialty or research area in Biological Sciences?
I work on both tunicates and hemi- chordates. I work on marine invertebrates
and I'm very interested in how gene networks work to make particular body plans.
Why do you use tunicates as an experi -mental model, and which advantages
could you get by using these organisms?
So I started to work on tunicates because I
at the time that I started working on them 30 years ago, everyone believed
that they were the chordate ancestor and I think now um,
we still love them, I still work on them, but they probably- they're not.
They're very derived animals and I work on hemichordates cause I think they're more
like what the chordate ancestor was. But tunicates have been really fantastic
for us to understand gene networks and how gene networks work during developmental
processes, so a lot of people still work on them.
Could you tell us how or why you started working on tunicates?
Yeah, so I was a student at the University of Iowa and I lived in the middle of the country
and actually had never seen the ocean that I could remember. And I saw these
eggs that had different colours, so they had a coloured bioplasm that was a
yellow myoplasm and I saw it in my develop -mental biology book and I just said I have
to go to a marine lab and study these. And so I went to MBL the marine biological lab
at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
and fell in love with marine embryos and have worked on them ever since,
that was about 35 years ago. But ascidian eggs especially are just gorgeous and
I now work on a Boltenia at Friday Harbour Labs at the University of Washington where
I work, and it has a bright orange crescent and it is just gorgeous and anybody that
sees that embryo just falls in love with embryos because they're fantastic.
Tell us a short story on a funny experiment or experience with tunicates.
So um, I was really interested, I started out
working on ascidians, um well I went to Woods Hole and then I finished my PhD
working on chick embryos and then I went on a postdoc working on ascidians
and I was very interested in what happened when they metamorphosed so they would stick
down to a glass and then sit on the glass and so I was filming them and people would
come in and say that's ridiculous cus they would just see something stuck there
and everyone really thought I'd kinda lost my mind. But it turned out that
actually when you played it back, um there were lots of cells moving around
and it turns out what we know now is those are immune cells and so the
immune cells are involved in metamor -phosis and nobody knew that at the time
and so we did learn a lot from that, but it was hilarious because people thought that
I was filming something that didn't move and wondering what in the world I was doing.
How do you imagine the future of these orga -nisms in experimental biology/teaching?
So um I'm really excited, we're here right now at the tunicate meetings, and there's
about 160 people here, there's a big group working on them in Japan, and also in
the United States, and also in France. Some in Italy as well and I'm really excited
by all the new people I see working on them and people from our labs that are
doing postdocs and getting jobs because I think they're a fantastic model system
and I think because genomes are easy to sequence now people are starting to
sequence different genomes and I think that they're a great model system and
I think that they'll continue to be used a lot to understand how genomes work
and how genomes work during development.
Do you have anything to say about teaching?
Oh, teaching! So I use ascidians in teaching all the time.
One of the best things about having the coloured eggs is that you can really
show students what's important about cytoplasm being different,
having determinants in it, and that's how that's how eggs get kicked out.
Eggs have certain cytoplasms and then when the genes get into that when a
nuclei gets into that then the genes get turned on. So to get a certain animal
you have to have the egg plus the genome that they have,
and so I've done workshops for teachers where I have em go out
and find the animals and then they take em in and fertilise em and this is
in high schools, and then next day they'll be tadpoles and then the next day they'll
metamorphose so they could do a whole week-long thing and I've shown em how
to do that with kids just to show them how amazing development is
because it starts out as a single cell and it makes a tadpole.
So they are fantastic teaching tool as well
The last question is, could you say a few words on the tunicate scientific community?
Yes, so I'm a member of several scientific communities and I feel like the tunicates
scientific community is one of the more friendly ones, I think because there were
so few of us for a while that we talked to each other and helped each other.
And now there's new tools being made and people are really good about discussing and
giving new tools and also promoting our students and the different scientists
in the field and so I love these meetings, I was just thinking that last night.
I was like 'these are my people that are here". I'm just so happy to be here and
talking about my work and hearing about what they've been doing.