The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) recently announced the 2025 Whitman Center Fellows, a cohort of 24 exceptional scientists, including Stowers Institute Postdoctoral Researcher Ekasit Sonpho, Ph.D., a Whitman Early Career Fellow. The award supports scientists’ independent research for up to 10 weeks at the MBL.

Every summer, hundreds of scientists and students travel from around the world to the MBL in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The MBL offers a highly collaborative environment for researchers and unique resources including access to marine organisms and state-of-the-art imaging and sequencing technologies and facilities. As of 2022, the Stowers Institute has a dedicated year-round laboratory on MBL’s campus.

“Understanding the process of regeneration is one of the timeless questions that scientists have been fascinated with and continue to actively research,” said Sonpho, who studies planarian flatworm regeneration in the lab of Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D.

Sonpho’s Whitman Center Fellows research project, titled “Establishing transgenic planarians by leveraging VitelloTag for in ovo transfection,” will focus on developing a method for modifying planarian DNA. Creating transgenic, or genetically altered planarians has remained challenging.

VitelloTag was recently developed by MBL scientist Zak Swartz, Ph.D., as a novel method for genetically editing organisms that are not amenable to traditional CRISPR-Cas9 microinjection. Instead of individually injecting each egg, vitellogenin, a naturally occurring yolk protein was found to have a small region that could be tagged with a protein, for example Cas9, to then organically introduce the tag to many eggs simultaneously.

Sonpho aims to utilize the VitelloTag method for developing CRISPR-Cas9 edited flatworms to further unravel the remarkable regenerative properties of planarians.

“I am thrilled to receive the Whitman Early Career Fellowship that will allow me to collaborate with MBL scientists and may lead to many new discoveries,” said Sonpho. “Ultimately, I hope to push the boundaries of developmental biology further for future generations of scientists.”