The people behind the papers – Julia Grzymkowski and Nanette Nascone-Yoder

As the digestive system develops, the gut tube lengthens and convolutes to correctly package the intestine. Intestinal malrotation is a prevalent birth anomaly, but its underlying causes are not well understood. In this new study, Nanette Nascone-Yoder and colleagues show that exposure of Xenopus embryos to atrazine, a widely-used herbicide, can disrupt cellular metabolism in the developing gut tube and lead to intestinal malrotation. We caught up with first author Julia Grzymkowski and corresponding author Nanette Nascone-Yoder, Professor at North Carolina State University, to hear more about the story.