Publications related to FGF signaling is necessary for establishing gut tube domains along the anterior-posterior axis in vivo

Engineering hydrogel microenvironments for epithelial organoid culture

Organoids, miniature tissues generated from self-organizing stem cells within three-dimensional (3D) extracellular matrices (ECM), have opened up exciting possibilities for in vitro studies of complex physiological processes. A key factor in the success of ...

EPFL2024

Multimodal characterization of murine gastruloid development

Matthias Lütolf, Raphaël Ortiz, Stefano Davide Vianello, Alexandre Gauthier Aurèle Mayran

Gastruloids are 3D structures generated from pluripotent stem cells recapitulating fundamental principles of embryonic pattern formation. Using single-cell genomic analysis, we provide a resource mapping cell states and types during gastruloid development ...

CELL PRESS2023

How are cells instructed to form somite boundaries by the zebrafish segmentation clock?

Olivier François Venzin

In vertebrate embryos, the elongating body axis is patterned via the sequential and rhyth-mic production of segments from a posterior unsegmented tissue called the presomitic mesoderm (PSM). This process is controlled by a population of cellular oscillator ...

EPFL2023

Puckered and JNK signaling in pioneer neurons coordinates the motor activity of the Drosophila embryo

Samuel William Vernon

Central nervous system organogenesis is a complex process that obeys precise architectural rules. The impact that nervous system architecture may have on its functionality remains, however, relatively unexplored. To clarify this problem, we analyze the dev ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Transcriptomic data meta-analysis reveals common and injury model specific gene expression changes in the regenerating zebrafish heart

Marius Alexandru Botos Rogozsan

Zebrafish have the capacity to fully regenerate the heart after an injury, which lies in sharp contrast to the irreversible loss of cardiomyocytes after a myocardial infarction in humans. Transcriptomics analysis has contributed to dissect underlying signa ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Unlocking Hidden Potential: Exploring the Complexities of Signaling in Immune Cell Activation to Optimize CAR Therapy

Mathieu Girardin

Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are synthetic, transmembrane proteins that trigger immune cell signaling following their engagement. They have been first utilized in T cells and later in natural killer (NK) cells to redirect their cytotoxicity toward a s ...

EPFL2023

Neurogenesis redirects β-catenin from adherens junctions to the nucleus to promote axonal growth

Antonio Herrera Camacho

Here, we show that, in the developing spinal cord, after the early Wnt-mediated Tcf transcription activation that confers dorsal identity to neural stem cells, neurogenesis redirects beta-catenin from the adherens junctions to the nucleus to stimulate Tcfo ...

Company Biologists Ltd2023

Development of a Robotic Microsurgeon for Embryonic Research

Ece Özelçi

Understanding how biological matter takes its shape is instrumental to biology, bioengineering, medicine, and bioinspired engineering. Gaining information on the principles of morphogenesis could enable clinicians to correct developmental abnormalities, ev ...

EPFL2023

In vitro endoderm emergence and self-organisation in the absence of extraembryonic tissues and embryonic architecture

Stefano Davide Vianello

In humans, mice, and other mammals key internal organs such as the gut, the lungs, the pancreas, and the liver all derive from the same embryonic tissue: the endoderm. The development of all of these structures thus depends on a same set of early cells, an ...

EPFL2022

Differential impact of TGF beta/SMAD signaling activity elicited by Activin A and Nodal on endoderm differentiation of epiblast stem cells

Pierre Osteil

Allocation of cells to an endodermal fate in the gastrulating embryo is driven by Nodal signaling and consequent activation of TGF beta pathway. In vitro methodologies striving to recapitulate the process of endoderm differentiation, however, use TGF beta ...

WILEY2022

An automated do-it-yourself system for dynamic stem cell and organoid culture in standard multi-well plates

Matthias Lütolf, Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Stefano Davide Vianello, Julia Tischler, Hao-An Hsiung

We present a low-cost, do-it-yourself system for complexmammalian cell culture under dynamically changing medium formulations by integrating conventional multi-well tissue culture plates with simple microfluidic control and system automation. We demonstrat ...

2022

Reaction wavefront theory of notochord segment patterning

Andrew Charles Oates

The vertebrate axis is segmented into repetitive structures, the vertebrae. In fish, these segmented structures are thought to form from the paraxial mesoderm and the adjacent notochord. Recent work revealed an autonomous patterning mechanism in the zebraf ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Premature Vertebral Mineralization in hmx1-Mutant Zebrafish

H6 family homeobox 1 (HMX1) regulates multiple aspects of craniofacial development, and mutations in HMX1 are linked to an ocular defect termed oculoauricular syndrome of Schorderet-Munier-Franceschetti (OAS) (MIM #612109). Recently, additional altered oro ...

2022

Deconstructing body axis morphogenesis in zebrafish embryos using robot-assisted tissue micromanipulation

Matthias Rüegg, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Erik Mailand, Ece Özelçi, Andrew Charles Oates

Classic microsurgical techniques, such as those used in the early 1900s by Mangold and Spemann, have been instrumental in advancing our understanding of embryonic development. However, these techniques are highly specialized, leading to issues of inter-ope ...

Nature Research2022

Targeted search for scaling genes reveals matrix metalloproteinase 3 as a scaler of the dorsal-ventral pattern in Xenopus laevis embryos

Daria Korotkova

How embryos scale patterning according to size is still not fully understood. Through in silico screening and analysis of reaction-diffusion systems that could be responsible for scaling, we predicted the existence of genes whose expression is sensitive to ...

Cell Press - Elsevier2022

Preparation of Single-Somite Explants from Zebrafish Embryos

Andrew Charles Oates, Sundar Ram Naganathan

The body axis of vertebrate embryos is periodically subdivided into 3D multicellular units called somites. While genetic oscillations and molecular prepatterns determine the initial length-scale of somites, mechanical processes have been implicated in sett ...

JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS2022

Hunting for the wavefront: investigation of somite boundary positioning in zebrafish

Arianne Bercowsky Rama

Somitogenesis is the rhythmic and sequential formation of somites, which are tissue blocks that give rise to segmented adult body structures including the vertebrae and associated muscle. Somite formation is controlled by the segmentation clock, a populati ...

EPFL2022

Human reproduction is regulated by retrotransposons derived from ancient Hominidae-specific viral infections

Didier Trono, Julien Paul André Pontis, Yu Tao

The transcription factor network required for primordial germ cell (PGC) specification is known to diverge in mammals. Here the authors show that hominidae-specific transposable element (TE) LTR5Hs becomes transcriptionally active during PGC specification, ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Towards engineering an artificial neural tube

Jisoo Park

In this thesis, I present a self-organizing neural tube organoid that is strikingly similar in morphology, cell-type composition, and patterning to the mouse embryonic neural tube. When exposed to a sequence of epiblast culture conditions and neural differ ...

EPFL2021

Capturing Cardiogenesis in Gastruloids

Matthias Lütolf, Romain Guiet, Mehmet Ugur Girgin, Giuliana Rossi, Andrea Boni, Nicolas Antoine Vincent Broguiere

Organoids are powerful models for studying tissue development, physiology, and disease. However, current culture systems disrupt the inductive tissue-tissue interactions needed for the complex morphogenetic processes of native organogenesis. Here, we show ...

CELL PRESS2021