2001 ASBMB Fellowship: Stephen Rodda

rodda Stephen Rodda completed his Bachelor of Science with Honours in 1998 under the supervision of Professor Peter Rathjen at Adelaide University in the Department of Biochemistry. Stephen's Honours project involved the isolation and characterisation of a pluripotent cell marker gene, CRTR-1. Isolation of the CRTR-1 cDNA, including the open reading frame, revealed that CRTR-1 was a novel member of the CP2 family of transcription factors on the basis of sequence similarity at the nucleic and amino acid level. Stephen received First Class Honours and was awarded the Brian and Heather Forster Prize in Biochemistry and Adelaide University Medal for his performance in the Honours Program.

In July of 1999, after spending several months seeing the sights overseas, Stephen commenced his PhD in the same laboratory continuing with the initial work of his Honours year.

CRTR-1 expression is both developmentally and spatially regulated at the mRNA level. Specifically, CRTR-1 mRNA is expressed by the pluripotent cells of the early mouse embryo with expression rapidly down regulating upon pluripotent cell differentiation. Later during development and in the adult mouse, CRTR-1 is expressed highest by the kidney with CRTR-1 expression limited to the single cell layer of epithelium lining the distal convoluted tubules. This contrasts to other CP2 family members which are ubiquitously expressed. Functional characterisation has demonstrated that CRTR-1 acts as a transcriptional repressor when bound to a heterologous promoter and defines CRTR-1 as the first reported CP2 family member to act as a direct repressor of transcription.

Stephen is currently conducting studies investigating protein binding partners for CRTR-1 by way of yeast two hybrid and GST pull down experiments. Further, Stephen is testing the developmental importance of CRTR-1 by generation of Cre/Lox transgenic mice enabling the functional importance of CRTR-1 to be tested for both pluripotent cells during early development and distal convoluted tubule development and physiology in the adult mouse. The ASBMB fellowship will enable Stephen to attend the 14th International Congress of Developmental Biology in Kyoto, Japan, this year.

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This page last modified: October 10, 2008.