Erica Hutchins, PhD
Assistant Professor
Cell and Tissue Biology
School of Dentistry

Neural crest cells are an essential stem cell population in the vertebrate embryo. During development, these cells must undergo coordinated induction, specification, and epithelial—mesenchymal transition (EMT) events to migrate and ultimately develop into a wide range of cell types that contribute to the adult organism.

Dysregulated post-transcriptional regulatory linkages in neural crest can lead to congenital malformations and cancer in humans, and a thorough understanding of the mechanisms underlying these fundamental processes can provide new therapeutic targets for biomedical intervention.

By leveraging systems-level approaches and cutting-edge developmental biology techniques to understand how neural crest cell state transitions are achieved post-transcriptionally to drive cell fate choices, we can begin to understand how these programs fail during development or may be hijacked during disease.

The major research goals of our laboratory are: 1) To identify the post-transcriptional regulatory linkages controlling neural crest fate decisions across developmental time and space 2) To parse the intersection of intrinsic and extrinsic factors with post-transcriptional regulation during neural crest and nervous system development 3) To leverage post-transcriptional regulatory linkages controlling EMT and migration in neural crest and neural crest-derived cancers

• Essential function and targets of BMP signaling during midbrain neural crest delamination.
  Developmental biology 2021 Piacentino ML, Hutchins EJ, Bronner ME
• Transcriptomic Identification of Draxin-Responsive Targets During Cranial Neural Crest EMT.
  Frontiers in physiology 2021 Hutchins EJ, Piacentino ML, Bronner ME
• A Spectrum of Cell States During the Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition.
  Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) 2021 Hutchins EJ, Bronner ME
• Bimodal function of chromatin remodeler Hmga1 in neural crest induction and Wnt-dependent emigration.
  eLife 2020 Gandhi S, Hutchins EJ, Maruszko K, Park JH, Thomson M, Bronner ME
• Draxin alters laminin organization during basement membrane remodeling to control cranial neural crest EMT.
  Developmental biology 2018 Hutchins EJ, Bronner ME
• Draxin acts as a molecular rheostat of canonical Wnt signaling to control cranial neural crest EMT.
  The Journal of cell biology 2018 Hutchins EJ, Bronner ME
• Migration and diversification of the vagal neural crest.
  Developmental biology 2018 Hutchins EJ, Kunttas E, Piacentino ML, Howard AGA, Bronner ME, Uribe RA
• A novel role for the nuclear localization signal in regulating hnRNP K protein stability in vivo.
  Biochemical and biophysical research communications 2016 Hutchins EJ, Belrose JL, Szaro BG
• Phosphorylation of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein K at an extracellular signal-regulated kinase phosphorylation site promotes neurofilament-medium protein expression and axon outgrowth in Xenopus.
  Neuroscience letters 2015 Hutchins EJ, Belrose JL, Szaro BG
• c-Jun N-terminal kinase phosphorylation of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein K regulates vertebrate axon outgrowth via a posttranscriptional mechanism.
  The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 2013 Hutchins EJ, Szaro BG