EDWARD M. LEVINE
Ed Levine
email: ed.levine@utah.edu		 Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences

Developmental Neuroscience
Molecular Neuroscience
Cellular Neuroscience

B.S. 1986, SUNY ay Albany; Ph.D. 1994, SUNY at Stony Brook; Postdoctoral Fellow, 1995-1999, University of Washington, Seattle.

RESEARCH:

My lab is focused on two broad areas; (i) understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of retinal development, and (ii) determining the contributions of developmental mechanisms to the progression and treatment of retinal degenerative diseases. We study the murine retina because its developmental progression is well understood, in vitro and in vivo approaches are established, and several genetic models of retinal degeneration are available. Because of these advantages, we can identify and characterize important regulatory molecules and directly test their role in degeneration.

In the developing vertebrate retina, multipotential progenitor cells respond to environmental signals to expand the progenitor pool and generate one glial and six neuronal cell types. For this to occur, proliferation and differentiation must be balanced. The observation that cell cycle withdrawal precedes the onset of cellular differentiation suggests that the regulation of these processes is tightly linked. To address this, we are identifying the genes expressed in retinal progenitors that regulate the cell cycle and coordinate cell cycle withdrawal with the onset of differentiation.

Selected Publications

Levine, E. M., and Green, E. S. (2004) Cell-intrinsic regulation of proliferation in vertebrate retinal progenitors. Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology, 15:63-74.

Levine, E. M. (2004) Cell cycling through development. Development, 131:2241-2246.

Green, E. S., Stubbs, J. L., and Levine, E. M. (2003) Genetic rescue of cell number in a mouse model of microphthalmia: interactions of Chx10 with G1 cell cycle regulators. Development, 130:539-552.

Wu, Y. Y., Liu, Y., Levine, E. M., and Rao, M. S. (2003) Hes1 but not Hes5 regulates an astrocyte versus oligodendrocyte fate choice in glial restricted precursors. Developmental Dynamics, 226:675-689.

Jones, B. W., Watt, C. B., Frederick, J. M., Baehr, W., Chen, C. K., Levine, E. M., Milam, A. H., LaVail, M. M., and Marc, R. E. (2003) Retinal remodeling triggered by photoreceptor degenerations. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 464:1-16.

Defoe, D. M., and Levine, E. M. (2003) Expression of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27Kip1 by developing retinal pigment epithelium. Gene Expression Patterns, 3:615-619.

*Cunningham, J. J., *Levine, E. M., Zindy, F., Roussel, M. F., Smeyne, R. J. (200) The cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors, p19Ink4d and p27Kip1, are co-expressed in select retinal cells and act co-operatively to control cell cycle exit. Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, 19:359-374. *equal contribution

Levine, E. M., Close, J., Fero, M., Ostrovsky, A., and Reh, T. A. (2000) p27kip1 regulates cell cycle withdrawal of late multipotent progenitor cells in the mammalian retina. Devel. Biol., 219:299-314.

Levine, E. M., Fuhrmann, S., and Reh, T. A. (2000) Soluble factors and the development of rod photoreceptors. Cell Mol. Life Sci., 57:224-234.

Chow, L., Levine, E. M., and Reh, T. A. (1998) The nuclear receptor transcription factor, RORb, regulates retinal progenitor proliferation. Mech. Dev., 77:149-164.

Reh, T. A., and Levine, E. M. (1998) Multipotential stem cells and progenitors in the vertebrate retina. J. Neurobiol., 36:206-220.

Levine, E. M., Roelink, H., Turner, J., and Reh, T. A. (1997) Hedgehog protein promotes rod photoreceptor differentiation in mammalian retinal cells in vitro. J. Neuroscience, 17:6277-6288.

Levine, E. M., Passini, M. A., Hitchcock, P. F., Glasgow, E., and Schechter, N. (1997) Vsx-2 and Vsx-1:Two Chx10-like homeobox genes expressed in overlapping domains in the adult goldfish retina. J. Comp. Neurol., 387:439-448.

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