The creation of a multicellular organism from a single cell requires the intricate coordination of many cellular processes including gene regulation, intracellular trafficking, and cell signaling. More remarkable is that this process is repeated generation after generation stereotypicly and with high fidelity.
Though the general principles of how a single cell becomes a multicellular organism are known, many details involved in this process (such as embryonic genome activation, early zygotic protein function, and coordination of maternal and paternal epigenetic information to list a few) are still a mystery. We theorize that these unknown details hold the secrets of many developmental diseases and have the potential to be targets of therapeutic treatments.
Our goal is to determine these unknown molecular players and figure out how they fit mechanistically in to the cellular processes that govern organismal development.