Russ Anthony

Throughout my entire career, my research has focused on pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes. This includes efforts focused on the establishment and maintenance of pregnancy, development of the placenta, placental function, and maternal/placental/fetal interactions in normal and compromised pregnancies. Over the years, our investigations have included protein purification and sequencing, examination of gene organization and sequence, specific gene transcriptional regulation, microarray and RNAseq assessment of gene expression, mRNA and protein expression, protein-protein interactions, maternal and fetal hormone concentrations, as well as in vivo assessment of altered placental function. While we have used various animal models, most of our research has used the pregnant sheep, because the pregnant sheep has provided considerable insight into the physiology of pregnancy relevant to humans. This is due to the fact that we can chronically instrument/catheterize both the mother and fetus, allowing us to use the Fick Principle to determine steady-state uptake, transfer and utilization of oxygen, nutrients, hormones, etc., under non-stressed/non-anesthetized conditions (e.g., Regnault et al., 2003 and Barry et al., 2016). More recently we developed and validated lentiviral-mediated RNA interference (RNAi) within trophoblast cells in vivo (Baker et al., 2016) allowing the specific targeting of mRNA/protein solely within the placenta. By utilizing in vivo RNA interference within the sheep placenta, and coupling that with in vivo steady-state physiological assessment of the resulting pregnancies, Dr. Anthony’s laboratory is providing new insight into the in vivo physiological ramifications of altering specific gene products produced by the placenta. This includes investigations into placental hormone function (Tanner et al., 2021a,b) and placental nutrient transport (Vaughn et al., 2021; Lynch et al., 2022).