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Jeff Rasmussen

@jraslab.bsky.social

497 followers 656 following 18 posts

We study skin-neuron interactions in #zebrafish. Located in beautiful #Seattle (UW Biology). Join us! #devbio #organogenesis #regeneration Lab website: jraslab.org

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Together, our work reveals a detailed lineage progression of Merkel cells and sheds light on how epithelial progenitors can create specialized derivatives during organ regeneration

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Lastly, by performing in silico lineage analysis, we showed that a subpopulation of suprabasal keratinocytes have the potential to generate Merkel cells, which we validated in vivo through the generation of a novel transgenic tool

Epidermal cell fate analysis from scRNA-seq identifies Merkel cell progenitors

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We found that as the Merkel cell lineage branches from epithelial progenitors, it adopts an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) gene signature – an observation that nicely jives with our previous live-cell imaging of Merkel cell progenitors journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Analysis of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition gene signature in the Merkel cell subcluster

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We further performed a cross-species comparison with mouse and human Merkel cells to define deeply conserved gene modules

Cross-species analyses with mouse and human Merkel cells

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We captured Merkel cells in our scRNA-seq dataset and analyzed the corresponding transcriptome to define new, highly specific markers of Merkel cells

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

To investigate Merkel cell regeneration, we generated a scRNA-seq dataset at several points of adult skin regeneration following dermal appendage injury

Overview of scRNA-seq experiment during dermal appendage (scale) regeneration

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Jeff Rasmussen @jraslab.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

🎉 Our study identifying the direct precursors of Merkel cells is now published in @dev-journal.bsky.social Thank you to our reviewers @reviewcommons.org and collaborators for helping us improve the manuscript. Check out these cell behaviors we visualized in #zebrafish skin. doi.org/10.1242/dev....

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