Welcome message

Picture
  • A major unanswered question in biology is how differentiation of the myriad cell types of the adult body is hard-wired in the genome. Our goal is to elucidate the mechanisms controlling endoderm formation by combining experimental and computational approaches. Production of a thorough endodermal gene regulatory network (GRN) will provide a useful framework for prediction, that is applicable to early mouse and human embryogenesis, thereby offering valuable knowledge to the broader scientific community for reprogramming stem cells along endodermal cell lineages.
  • While assisted reproductive technology (ART) is being used in clinical settings with increasing success in the generation of viable pregnancies, there are areas of the procedure with considerable room for improvement. Development of a more rapid, safer, and more objective method would benefit the ART field significantly. We apply a non-invasive confocal imaging approach capable of measuring the metabolic state of living mammalian embryos undergoing in vitro culturing.

News

Picture
Owens et al., Cell Reports, 2016​
Biology has reached the state that quantitative measurements are required to describe biological phenomenon by theoretical models.  Such data are difficult to obtain from living embryos. Ken Cho’s lab (Dev and Cell Biology), together with colleagues at Yale U. (New Haven CT) and the Crick Institute (London UK) published a study in Cell Reports on their genomewide analysis of mRNAs over an extended timecourse of early vertebrate embryogenesis. The group has successfully quantitated all mRNA expression in living embryos for the first 3 day of development from the western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis. This time window corresponds to approximately the first 8 weeks of human gestation, a very difficult period to examine embryonic development. Determination of absolute mRNA numbers and kinetics of their accumulation will uncover the critical mechanisms controlling embryonic development.  ​

​WHITE PAPER on GENE REGULATORY NETWORK:
Links:
PubMed, Google Scholar, Xenbase, National Xenopus Resource, Gene Expression Charting Tools