10-26-06: The Thomson laboratory is looking for post doctoral fellows with strong backgrounds in developmental and molecular biology to pursue projects exploring human ES cell self-renewal, the basic biology of pluripotency, and reprogramming. Previous experience with homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells and BAC recombineering highly desirable.
Interested candidates should e-mail their current CV to: Dr. James Thomson
Understanding how a cell maintains or changes identity and understanding what limits the repertoire of identities that a particular cell can become are the basic themes of my laboratory. We use human embryonic (ES) stem cells as a model system because their unlimited proliferative capacity and developmental potential make them uniquely suited for exploring these themes in human material. In the early 1990s my laboratory derived ES cells from an Old World monkey (the rhesus macaque) and a New World monkey (the common marmoset), work that led to the derivation of human ES cells ( 1, 2, 3, 4.) Much of the initial work in my laboratory after that derivation focused on establishing human ES cells as an accepted, practical model system, and we developed, for example, improved culture conditions( 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), methods for genetic manipulation ( 10, 11, 12), and approaches for the in vitro differentiation to key lineages of clinical importance ( 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24) However, human ES cells are now firmly established as a practical model system, and we are now focused on using these tools to understand the basic biology of pluripotency. For example, we use several conditions that induce uniform differentiation to specific lineages to study in detail how ES cells decide to exit the pluripotent state and become restricted in their potential, and we use a hematopoietic model system to study how that process of restriction can be reversed ( 21, 25, 26).
Because the expertise and technology needed to study ES cells effectively exceeds what is available in a single laboratory, my laboratory is involved in several long-term collaborations. Collaborators include: Franco Cerrina, Genome Center of Wisconsin, and Bing Ren, UCSD/Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (transcription factor regulatory networks and chromatin structure); Josh Coon and Lloyd Smith, Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin (mass spectrometry methods for broadly tracking histone modifications and phosphorylation cascades during differentiation); Igor Slukvin, Department of Pathology, University of Wisconsin (hematopoietic differentiation of human ES cells as a model system to understand nuclear reprogramming); and Tom Soh, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UCSB (novel high throughput cell sorting methods for lineage analysis).