Joanna Smeeton, PhD

The long-term goal of the Smeeton lab research program is to seek out new ways to promote regeneration of complex joint tissues to treat joint diseases commonly associated with aging, including osteoarthritis. These tissues are notoriously hard to repair and have poor capacity to regenerate in human patients. The Smeeton lab has pioneered the use of surgical injury to zebrafish joints to interrogate regenerative cells and molecular mechanisms driving repair of complex synovial joint tissues. Her laboratory explores these new zebrafish injury models using techniques including live confocal imaging, single cell multiomics sequencing (RNA and ATACseq), and single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization.

The lab also generates transgenic and mutant zebrafish to understand the lineage relationships of skeletal cells, the genetics underlying arthritis, and the cellular, molecular, and epigenetic drivers of the robust repair of joint tissues. In addition to their work with regeneration, they are also developing zebrafish models for human congenital skeletal dysplasias and have used single cell sequencing approaches to probe the molecular underpinnings of human skeletal disease.