Lawrence Pinto, PhD

Professor and Chair of Neurobiology and Physiology
Charles McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Research Interests
Dr. Pinto is the associate director of the Center for Functional Genomics, and he is interested in discovering the genes that are involved in biological processes. His main efforts employ chemical mutagenesis and screening for phenotypes of interest. The two phenotypes that he studies are vision and asthma. Chemical mutagenesis is used to make point mutations in mice and screening for the two phenotypes is performed to identify mutants. The mutations are then mapped genetically to identify the region of the genome where the mutated gene lies. Various approaches are then used to clone the mutant gene. In another approach, variation in the phenotype among strains of mouse is used to identify the genes associated with the phenotype.