Understanding cell lineage plasticity in the development and evolution of vertebrate cranial cartilage

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Lauren Saunders
• Subject Area: Developmental Biology ; General Genetics and Functional Genome Biology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534669451

How multicellular organisms reproducibly develop from a single cell is a fundamental question in biology. New single cell genomics technologies now enable a high-resolution exploration of how cells multiply, differentiate and ultimately generate an entire organism. Still, measuring cellular embryonic history, or “lineage”, is very difficult with existing methods. In vertebrate animals, there are numerous instances of two separate cell lineages contributing to the same cell type or tissue. While it is clear that differences are imparted by a cell’s embryonic origin, we still do not understand the extent to which these constrain what cells are capable of during normal development or in the face of diverse perturbations. My research program will build on my prior work, where I uncovered an experimental system during zebrafish cranial cartilage development in which cells of the same tissue showed very different gene expression profiles depending on their mesodermal or neural crest lineage origin. We will leverage this system using scalable, high-throughput single cell genomics, lineage tracing, and high-resolution imaging to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying cranial development from this new perspective. Ultimately, the ability of cells to adopt new fates is linked to morphological adaptation during the course of evolution. We will additionally investigate morphological differences during cranial development in multiple strains of medaka, a cousin of zebrafish. Through comparative analyses of development across strains and species using quantitative approaches in genomics and imaging, our goal is to identify specific mechanisms that underlie adaptive changes over evolution.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups
• Major Instrumentation: Liquid Handling Device
• Instrumentation Group: 1060 Dilutoren, Pipettiergeräte, Probennehmer