This is the process Evans-Anderson and her assistants will continue to study with funding from the NIH grant, which will pay researchers and a lab technician while covering costs of supplies and facility and equipment rental for the next three years.
"We're trying to understand the basic questions about the biology of how the genes work using a simple model," Evans-Anderson said.
Congenital heart defects are the most common birth defect in humans, according to the American Heart Association. Cardiovascular disease is another threat, Evans-Anderson added.
Research like Evans-Anderson's is important because it could lead to changes in our understanding of the human heart and - years from now - provide the foundation for medical advancements.
Sea squirts get their names from how they behave in the wild, attaching themselves to things like wharfs, boats and reefs, where they live out their lives - sucking in water, filtering out the microalgae to eat and squirting water back out.
Sea squirts are hermaphrodites, meaning their reproductive organ produces both sperm and eggs. They reproduce by squirting out eggs and sperm in the water to mix with that of other sea squirts.
Other than that, their lives seem mundane. But what goes on inside their hearts is extraordinary.
During development, Evans-Anderson said, when a sea squirt's heart is forming, the cells are proliferating - "growing to build the heart."
The same process is going on in a human heart as the embryo develops.
But unlike the sea squirt, whose cells continue to multiply throughout life, allowing damaged heart tissue to heal itself, the cells of a human heart all no longer proliferate, or regenerate, in a meaningful way after birth.
"If we can see why regeneration happens" in a sea squirt's heart, she said, "we can then see what's different" in human heart development.
The answers lie in genetic research.
Evans-Anderson and research assistants James Tucker and John Samies, both senior biology majors, are studying the development of sea squirt hearts - from fertilization to adulthood - by studying the genes that direct heart development and the processes that repair cells.
Running tests, looking through microscopes, and playing with petri dishes might seem a little slow, but Tucker and Samies are energized by it.
Samies plans to study orthopedics in medical school, but since he started working in research, he might see a different track ahead.
"I'm starting to get pulled toward research," he said. "Going through tissue samples, extracting RNA and making DNA from it - that's fascinating."
Tucker already knows he wants to be a research scientist, maybe focusing on microbiology.
"A lot of the things we learn in here we haven't learned in class," he said.
And, as Evans-Anderson pointed out, turning down the grinding rock coming from her computer, "We are also big fans of Rage Against the Machine."
Over the next three years, their work will involve isolating the sea squirts' heart-development genes, removing them and then watching how the organism develops without the gene. That will tell them something about how the missing gene functions and how it interacts with other genes.
It's like working on a car, Tucker said. Take something out, disconnect a wire, remove a part and watch to see what no longer happens.
Except with a sea squirt, it's a gene they're taking out.
It's a complicated process made easier by the fact that the sea squirt's genome is so much more simple than a human's.
Unlike the human genome, which has multiple copies of certain genes, the sea squirt's genome doesn't have as many copies to sort through, making it easier to identify genes, isolate them, and see how they function together.
This simplicity makes the sea squirt an ideal model.
If scientists can isolate the genes in a sea squirt that allow its heart cells to regenerate, Evans-Anderson said, they might be able to figure out which human genes could do the same thing and somehow "turn them on."
