Life in a petri-dish: From cell to organism

The placenta functions to support pregnancy by facilitating the transfer and exchange of nutrients and waste. Antibodies are small proteins produced by cells in the immune system that can help fight infections. During pregnancy, antibodies are transferred from the mother to the fetus by the placenta, providing immunity to the newborn baby in early life. This antibody transfer can be boosted via maternal vaccination. Studying antibody transfer across the placenta is important to guide therapeutic research, by providing an understanding of what occurs at the cellular level. In vitro models offer opportunities to explore this placental barrier, that animal models cannot provide. My research aims to develop a cell-based model of this placental barrier using stem cells and other cutting-edge systems. This innovative in vitro model provides a platform to investigate the specific processes responsible for transporting antibodies across the placenta to the fetus during pregnancy.

During development, it is important to have the correct cell type in the correct place and time. This is controlled by biological signals, that are interpreted by regions of non-coding DNA called regulatory elements, which act to switch genes on and off. Regulatory elements are often found a long way away from the genes they control, and it is not clear how regulatory elements bridge long distances to turn genes on and off. However, we do know that when this process goes wrong, it can cause diseases such as cancer.
I am studying the how the location of regulatory elements affects the function of a gene called Olig2, which is required for the development of motor neurons in spinal cord. To do this, I am using embryonic stem cells and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to identify on how the shape of DNA affects how cells can turn on the right genes at the right time during development.

Although it's hard to imagine, all our lives started as a single cell which had all the information needed to become an embryo. During embryonic development, our cells divide and make decisions to give rise to the thousands of cell types in our organisms, in the right place, and at the right time. However, our understanding of human development is limited because we would have to make use of embryos which poses ethical, legal, and technical limitations. For these reasons, scientists are turning to in vitro models of human development which mirror some aspects of embryo development. We can culture stem cells in the lab to understand how they interpret signals from their environment, coordinate, and interact with each other. In this talk you will learn about the 3D gastruloid model and some of the questions being addressed by scientists and see the advantages and limitations these models pose to understand how we come to be.