I’m a postdoctoral associate at Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of Dr. Steven Farber, where I seek to identify and characterize new genes involved in lipoprotein biogenesis. Zebrafish are a powerful model for the study of lipoprotein biology - lipoprotein machinary is conserved between zebrafish and humans, and the optical transparency of the larval zebrafish allows us to observe cell-level biology in a whole organism. In larval stages, zebrafish produce lipoproteins from maternally deposited yolk lipid in a tissue called the yolk syncitial layer. The yolk syncitial layer serves as the zebrafish’s first digestive organ, and expresses many genes that are later turned on in the liver and intestine once this tissues have developed. When lipoprotein synthesis is disrputed (i.e.: by mutation or drug inhibition), yolk lipid is no longer processed into lipoproteins and accumulates in the yolk syncitial layer instead, changing its optical properties. We leveraged this so-called “dark yolk” phenotype and the power of foward genetics to identify 28 novel dark yolk alleles. The mutant collection includes 10 alleles at known dark yolk loci (mttp, apobb.1, dgat2, mia2) as well as at least 13 additional novel loci. We developed a rapid mutation mapping pipieline called WheresWalker which we have so far used to identify 4 of the unknown loci. Using a suite of optical rerporters, genetic and small molecule manipulations, and human GWAS datasets, we are begnniing to uncover the mechanism by which these novel dark yolk genes contribute to lipoprotein metabolism.