Research
Elena is the key person in the Hemberger lab who is involved in the placental phenotyping screen. This is one of the central pillars of the Wellcome Trust-funded DMDD programme, the acronym for the “Deciphering the Mechanisms of Developmental Disorders” consortium. Principally, the aim of this programme is to screen all those mutants from the Sanger gene knockout pipeline that exhibit embryonic lethality in detail for embryonic as well as placental defects. Our role in this is the placental development screen. Elena has the rather demanding task to embed a large number of placentas and categorize them for defects, in the first instance by morphology determined by H&E staining, to then capture all these image data and add them to the phenotype database that is being collated. The anticipated outcome of this project is to gain, for the first time in his depth, an overview of how many embryonic lethal mutations have an underlying placental phenotype, and which morphological parameters are the most common to go awry in the development of the placental architecture.