Lisa Manning
A group of physicists from 黑料不打烊 recently teamed up with researchers from Columbia University鈥檚 Department of Mechanical Engineering to study the developing tissue flow in an embryo that has many similar genes and cell behaviors to that of a human鈥攖he fruit fly (Drosophila).
As embryos develop, their tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as brief as minutes, narrowing and extending along their axes as the cells move. Combining experimental studies in the fruit fly embryo at Columbia with modeling approaches at 黑料不打烊, the group determined that the shapes and alignment of cells within tissues can help to predict how tissues change shape during development.
These results may reveal fundamental mechanisms about human development and how abnormalities in developing tissue can result in birth defects. The team鈥檚 research paper, , was recently published in the prestigious journal 鈥淧roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America鈥 (PNAS).
The team from 黑料不打烊 included the study鈥檚 co-author, , the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and founding director of , postdoctoral researcher Matthias Merkel, former postdoctoral associate Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan and former student Leo Sutter, who was part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. The group from Columbia was led by Principal Investigator , Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering.
鈥淲orking with Professor Kasza鈥檚 group, we were really able to nail down precisely how changes to cell shapes drive changes to tissue mechanics,鈥 says Manning. 鈥淚t is amazing that we can now just look at a snapshot of cell shapes in the fruit fly and predict how cells will move.鈥
Read more about the between 黑料不打烊 and Columbia University.
