{"id":577,"date":"2024-10-16T12:18:22","date_gmt":"2024-10-16T16:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=577"},"modified":"2026-01-14T14:03:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T19:03:48","slug":"cynthia-a-bradham","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/profile\/cynthia-a-bradham\/","title":{"rendered":"Cynthia A. Bradham"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Our research is focused on understanding secondary (dorsal-ventral) axis specification and skeletal patterning in the sea urchin. We are interested in producing a systems-level description for these processes. Sea urchin, a non-chordate deuterostome, is an ideal model organism for systems-level developmental studies. Genomic analysis has revealed that sea urchins share the diversity of signaling and transcriptional molecules with vertebrates, including humans, but lack the complexity associated with a duplicated genome. Further, sea urchin larvae are morphologically quite simple, being composed of approximately 15 cell types, and thus are accessible to detailed analysis of cell specification and cell-cell communication mechanisms. Finally, the use of gene regulatory networks to model developmental processes was pioneered in urchin, providing a strong precedent for this work. The lab is focused primarily on two projects: understanding how the dorsal-ventral axis is specified, and how the larval skeleton is patterned. We are pursuing these projects through a combination of molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, computational modeling, and systems biology approaches.<\/span><\/p>\n<a href='https:\/\/people.bu.edu\/cbradham\/index.html' class='button '>Bradham Lab<\/a>\n<a href='https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/citations?user=xQat4DQAAAAJ&#038;hl=en' class='button '>Google Scholar<\/a>\n","protected":false},"author":24131,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24131"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/577\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}