Description

How the final form of a given embryo, tissue or organ is acquired during embryonic development, a process referred to as morphogenesis, is a key question for developmental biologists. Morphogenesis is driven by distinct combinations of gene expression that lead to changes in a range of cellular properties such as cell motility, cell adhesion and cell polarity, among others.

Research in our lab aims to shed some light into specific aspects of profound morphogenetic changes that occur during vertebrate embryonic development. Briefly, we aim to characterise the morphogenetic events that are required for proper development of the vertebrate heart and limbs. We expect that the development of these two tissues will tell us about morphogenetic processes involving cell migration, cell-cell communication, cell adhesion and later cell differentiation.

The animal model we use is zebrafish due to their ease of embryo accessibility, relatively low cost, and the great advantage of looking at the expression of a fluorescent reporter gene in the transparent, ex utero developing living embryo. Moreover, the long-standing use of this system as an experimental model is marked by the constant development of new techniques such as morpholino knock-down or transgenesis.

Objectives

The two main research objectives of the lab are as follows:

1. analysis of the morphogenetic processes that the embryonic heart and limbs undergo under normal developmental conditions

We aim to follow in vivo the precursor cells that will give rise to the heart and limbs during development using transgenic lines that express a fluorescent reporter in these tissues using live-embryo time-lapse analyses. We generate these reporter transgenic lines in the lab, by combining in silico identification of candidate regulatory regions of genes that are expressed in our favourite tissues linked to in vivo testing of these candidate regions using zebrafish as a model system.

2. alterations of the morphogenetic processes that the embryonic heart and limbs undergo under certain mutant conditions: a candidate approach
We aim to analyse in detail how and at which level the morphogenetic processes that the embryonic heart and limbs undergo are disrupted when certain zebrafish genes, that we have described and isolated through various approaches in the lab, are mutated. Again, the animal model we use is zebrafish due the constant development of new techniques such as morpholino knock-down or transgenesis.