The gastrointestinal tract is the site of many congenital and acquired disorders, particularly in morphology and the specification of epithelia along the gut tract. A better understanding of how the gut tract forms and particularly how different regions of the epithelium and mesoderm are specified and mature would aid in generating hypotheses about how such disorders occur and may be treated. To date there are few molecules studied that play a role in early epithelial patterning and morphogenesis in the gut. I have completed a complete analysis of Wnt signaling family members during chicken gut development from E4-E8 and have focused on Wnt5a because of its interesting expression pattern specifically in the mesoderm of the small intestine. The goal of this proposal is to discover what role Wnt5a plays in small intestinal development in the early chicken gut by using a combination of retroviral and electroporation delivery of the gene to alter its normal spatio-temporal expression pattern. We will be exploring how Wnt5a functions in the mesoderm and whether this function is in the muscle or non-muscle layers of the gut. We will also be inquiring as to what effects premature Wnt5a expression in the developing epithelium would cause, and whether the inappropriate expression of Wnt5a in the colon would perturb the growth or development of that tissue.
