Professor Karuna Sampath

How does an egg know where to put the head?

For animals to develop and position organs and structures (e.g. the head and heart) correctly, eggs must form and develop properly. Where the head will form is determined during egg development, but what governs this process is not well understood. Defects in egg development can underlie developmental disorders and infertility. The Sampath Laboratory focuses on fundamental mechanisms that control development and differentiation.

We use the zebrafish as a model organism to understand these processes because we can obtain hundreds of optically clear embryos that are fertilised and develop outside the body of the mother, which allows us to watch these processes in a live animal as they take place, both under normal conditions and upon disruption by various means. Our work has implications for human birth defects.

Professor Karuna Sampath

Karuna Sampath is a Professor of Biomedicine, University of Warwick. Following her doctoral training at Indiana State University, USA with Gary Stuart she did brief post-doctoral stints with Christopher Wright at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA (1995-1996), and Vladimir Korzh at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore (1997-1998).

She was a visiting scientist in Anne Ephrussi's lab at EMBL in 1999, and started her independent programme in 2000 as a fellow at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore. She was a group leader at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore from 2002-2013. In 2014, the Sampath lab re-located to the University of Warwick, and the group is now located in the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB) at Gibbet Hill.