December 21, 2020
Jesse Mager
UMass Amherst veterinary and animal science researchers Kim Tremblay and Jesse Mager, a wife-and-husband team nationally known for expertise in embryonic development, have each received five-year awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study distinct stages of embryo development in mice that have had essential genes knocked out. They will collaborate with Wei Cui, director of the Animal Models Core at the campus’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences.
Specifically, Mager and Tremblay, who are co-investigators on each other’s grants, have chosen to investigate a large number of lethal genes whose function is not well understood or not studied at all. These knock-out animals are produced by the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), part of the international mouse phenotyping consortium (IMPC), a global effort to identify the function of every protein-coding gene in the mouse genome. The genes that Mager and Tremblay study are those that, when