Using zebrafish as a model organism, two Wofford students spent the summer studying a little-understood gene called Tango6 and the role it plays in embryonic development.
The gene was first identified in a 4-year-old boy born with severe developmental delays, heart defects, brain abnormalities, seizures and hearing and vision loss. He was referred to the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a National Institutes of Health-funded program that uses genome sequencing to help diagnose rare or unexplained diseases.
That’s when Dr. Kelli Caroll, assistant professor of biology, says researchers first identified Tango6 and discovered the boy carried a mutation of the gene.
“By studying what Tango6 does in zebrafish, we’re hoping to better understand and diagnose the human diseases that result from its mutations,” Carroll says.
Carroll, Emma O’Brien ’26 and Sarah Stahl ’27 used the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to functionally inactivate Tango6 in fish embryos to see how different organs were affected.
“We saw abnormalities in the jaw, the gut and the spinal cord, so it clearly has a lot of important roles in development,” says Stahl, a biology major from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Zebrafish, an Asian freshwater fish with zebra-like stripes, are an ideal experimental model for such research since they reproduce and mature quickly, and their eggs are translucent and fertilized outside of the mother’s body. They also share 70% of the same genes with humans.
To tease out exactly what Tango6 does, the Wofford researchers took newly fertilized embryos, injected them with CRISPR to delete the gene and then observed the eggs under a microscope.
“All the development is happening externally, so we can watch the organs grow in the lab and stain the heart or the liver to see any abnormalities,” says O’Brien, a chemistry and Spanish double major from San Antonio, Texas.
In the long term, Carroll says they’d like to understand how Tango6 interacts with different proteins since “it’s probably working with other genes in this larger signaling network.”
“Once we find that out, we can look at other undiagnosed genetic conditions to see whether they can be explained by Tango6 not functioning properly,” says Stahl. “The implications are really exciting.”
The Tango6 research project was funded by a $5,500 South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities grant. Carroll also led a second research project this summer with Rylee Ashley ’27, a biology major from Anderson, South Carolina, that used zebrafish to study cardiac arrythmias as a side effect in prescription drugs. The project is in collaboration with researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas.