I am a comparative physiologist and cell biologist, interested in the mechanisms allowing organisms to survive in extreme and marginal environments. I use whole organism physiology, cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, and field work to understand the complete biology of organisms in response to environmental stress.
Much of my work has focused on anoxia tolerant vertebrates that live for weeks to months without oxygen.
Most vertebrates are anoxia-sensitive, and suffer in a matter of minutes without oxygen. However, a few vertebrate species have evolved remarkable anoxia tolerance, such as embryos of the annual killifish Austrofundulus limnaeus and the western painted turtle Chrysemys picta bellii, which can survive months without oxygen. Animals that survive anoxia depend on profound metabolic depression, anaerobic metabolism, and the ability to avoid or repair damage incurred from the transition back to an oxygenated environment. My research focuses on the biology of anoxia-tolerant vertebrates.
My doctoral work investigated small non-coding RNAs in anoxia-tolerant vertebrates:
Riggs, C.L., Summers, A., Warren, D.E., Nilsson, G.E., Lefevre, S., Dowd, W.W., Milton, S., and Podrabsky, J.E. 2018. Small Noncoding RNA Expression and Vertebrate Anoxia Tolerance. Front. Genet. 9:230.
Riggs, C.L. & Podrabsky, J.E. 2017. Small noncoding RNA expression during extreme anoxia tolerance of annual killifish (Austrofundulus limnaeus) embryos. Physiological Genomics. 49(9),505-518.
Some of this work was also featured in the news section of Science.
As a postdoc at Saint Louis University in the Warren lab I studied the physiological adaptations to anoxia in the painted turtle using fieldwork and proteomics:
Alderman, S.L., Riggs, C.L., Bullingham, O.M.N., Gillis, T.E., Warren, D.E. 2021. Cold-acclimation induces life stage-specific responses in the cardiac proteome of Western painted turtles (Chrysemys picta bellii): implications for anoxia tolerance. J Exp Biol; jeb.242387. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.242387
Currently I am a research fellow at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the Anderson lab studying stress granules and processing bodies, stress-responsive membraneless organelles that may regulate gene expression.
For further information please see my CV.