The Barna Lab seeks to address how the living blueprints of developing organisms are built.
The Beachy lab studies the function of Hedgehog proteins and other extracellular signals in morphogenesis (pattern formation) and in injury repair and regeneration (pattern maintenance). We study how the distribution of such signals is regulated in tissues, how cells perceive and respond to distinct concentrations of signals, and how such signaling pathways arose in evolution. We also study the normal roles of such signals in stem-cell physiology and their abnormal roles in the formation and expansion of cancer stem cells.
We seek to understand the control of gene expression.
A major direction in the lab is to understand how such long-range interactions occur, how they achieve target specificity, and how they may be reprogrammed by alterations to the genome sequence.
Small-molecule modulators of the Hedgehog pathway
We seek to understand the mechanisms that regulate self-renewal, proliferation and differentiation in adult stem cell linages.
Our aim is to identify and characterize systems that influence the interplay among genetic variation, phenotypic diversity, and environmental fluctuations at the molecular level, integrating our findings to gain insight into complex cellular systems.
Seung Kim Lab
Our goal is to identify and understand the pathways that govern organogenesis of the pancreas, a vital organ with endocrine and exocrine functions.
The Molecular Basis of Vertebrate Evolution.
As developmental biologists, we aspire to understand how pluripotent cells become diversified into lineages ranging from brain to blood to bone. By deciphering the underlying design principles, we hope to generate pure populations of these cell-types from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells for regenerative medicine.
Our laboratory is interested in the growth, development and integrity of animal tissues. We study multiple different organs, trying to identify common principles, and we extend these investigations to cancer and injury repair.
Understanding the control logic in the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus has progressed to the point where we now have an integrated systems view of the operation of its entire cell cycle functioning as a state machine.
Our lab takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand the systems biology of a living cell.
Our research focuses on the development and function of glial cells in the vertebrate nervous system. Using genetic screens and cellular approaches in zebrafish, we aim to discover new genes with essential functions in glial cells, define new animal models of important disorders in humans, and provide new avenues toward therapies for injury and disease of the nervous system.
Research in the Villeneuve lab is aimed at understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the faithful inheritance and function of eukaryotic chromosomes. Our primary focus is on elucidating the events required for the orderly segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis, the crucial process by which diploid germ cells generate haploid gametes.
We are a discovery-driven research group working at the interface between developmental biology, bioengineering, and statistical physics. We combine quantitative organism-wide fluorescence imaging ("deep imaging"), functional genomics ("deep sequencing"), and statistical modeling to understand the fundamental rules that control collective cell behaviors to optimize tissue organization, regeneration, adaptation, and evolution. We also seek opportunities for applying these rules to improve engineering systems.
Dr. Weissman’s laboratory is working on identifying and characterizing the progression of discrete changes, genetic and epigenetic, that leads to the generation of cancer stem cells (CSCs) from a variety of blood and solid tissue cancers. They have found a single molecular event present in all cancers studied to date that protects them from macrophages of the innate immune system.
The precise and robust regulation of gene expression is a cornerstone for complex biological life. Research in our laboratory is focused on understanding how regulatory information encoded by the genome is integrated with the transcriptional machinery and chromatin context to allow for emergence of form and function during human embryogenesis and evolution, and how perturbations in this process lead to disease.