Steven Cincotta
Mentor’s Name
Laertis Ikonomou
Location
Boston University’s Medical Campus Center for Regenerative Medicine
Title of Project
“Study of the Effect of Transient Nkx2.1 Expression During Directed Differentiation of Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells to Lung/Thyroid Progenitor Cells.”
Cincotta’s study is focused on the process of turning mouse embryonic stem cells into a special type of cell known as a lung/thyroid progenitor cell that can give rise to mature cell lineages of both the lung and thyroid. Specifically, working on studying different signals that can be given to these cells during the directed differentiation procedure in order to increase the efficiency of the process. He uses a variety of techniques to characterize the gene expression patterns of our resulting cells, including immunocytochemistry, flow cytometry, and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR).