Engineered Developmental Signals Could Illuminate Regenerative Medicine (VIDEO)
Caption
Scientists are still working to understand how morphogens' signals are broadcast over just the right distances and how cells are calibrated to respond to the proper concentration at the appropriate time. But these questions are difficult to investigate because natural morphogens interact with their environment in many complex, hard to define ways. Instead of deconstructing morphogens one interaction at a time, Lim's synthetic biology team at UCSF and a pair of research groups at the Francis Crick Institute in London -- led by Guillaume Salbreux, PhD, and Jean-Paul Vincent, PhD (himself once a post-doc with UCSF's Patrick O'Farrell, PhD) -- independently took the innovative approach of engineering a synthetic morphogen from the ground up. Their goals, as reported in two papers published October 16, 2020, in Science, were to study what makes morphogens work, and perhaps one day to create synthetic signals that could help control tissue regeneration or guide cellular therapies to heal wounds or fight cancers.
Credit
Lim Lab / UCSF
Usage Restrictions
In reference to the associated paper only
License
Licensed content