Lab of Michael Elowitz at Caltech. Synthetic biology and systems biology
Los Angeles
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Delivering and expressing a gene in cells is usually a messy (heterogeneous) process. The messiness interferes with research and applications such as gene therapy.
In two new papers, we introduce a toolbox of synthetic miRNA-based control circuits that enable more precise, gene dosage-invariant gene expression, and show how they improve a mouse model of Rett syndrome gene therapy:
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… ,led by @RongrongDu123 and @MichaelJAFlynn
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… , led by @MichaelJAFlynn and Acacia Mayfield, in collaboration with Viviana Gradinaru.
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This illustration by @Wonderstrucksci, inspired by Waddington’s second most famous drawing, shows with remarkable directness how MultiFate’s 3 transcription factors, interacting in combinations, produce a multistable epigenetic landscape.
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Just posted a preprint on our new spatial genomic recording system, baseMEMOIR.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Motivation: Cells divide, differentiate, and migrate to form exquisitely organized tissues. Reconstructing the dynamic histories of individual cells, including their lineage relationships and ancestral states, is essential for understanding how intrinsic and extrinsic signals generate tissues during development and in regenerative medicine.
Engineered genomic recording systems can reconstruct cell lineage histories from endpoint measurements. However, existing methods either require sequencing (disrupting spatial organization) or have been limited in memory size and scalability.
To address this need, @ChadlyDuncan, Kirsten Frieda, and others in the lab created a high memory capacity image-readable recording system termed baseMEMOIR.
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Many intercellular communication systems (BMP, Notch, Wnt, FGF, etc) use sets of promiscuously interacting ligand and receptor variants rather than seemingly simpler one-to-one architectures. Why? Our 2 papers grappling w/this question just out in @CellSystemsCP
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“Messy” many-to-many protein networks control signaling, transcription, adhesion, etc. Is this a bug or a feature? In this new perspective, we argue for feature, critical for multicellularity. With brilliant @HeidiKlumpe, @jgojalvo, & @yaronantebi. authors.elsevier.com/a/1hHu6…
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The best cells speak for themselves. Our new system, intMEMOIR, allows cells to record lineage history in a digital format that can be recovered by imaging: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/….
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RNA is informant and agent. Controlled RNA export from cells could enable cell-cell delivery of functional and non-destructive tracking of cell dynamics. Our new paper, led by brilliant @FelixHorns, engineers RNA export for both capabilities: authors.elsevier.com/sd/arti…
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If we could read out DNA barcodes in situ, we could “see” the history of individual cells directly in tissues. Here we show good old T7 polym transcribes barcodes in fixed cells, without in vivo expression, providing unexpected capabilities. go.nature.com/2CX0tNu 1/
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Our new lab website, years in the making, is now live: elowitz.caltech.edu. (And a fond farewell to our old website…)
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What does it take to generate multiple cell states? To find out, we designed and built "MultiFate", a synthetic circuit that generates multistability in mammalian cells. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… . Work from brilliant student @RonZhu2015 w/ @jesusdelrio_7 and @jgojalvo.
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In his 1952 classic, Turing showed that ≥2 interacting, continuously diffusing morphogens can spontaneously generate beautiful biological patterns. On a discrete cell lattice, we find that 1 morphogen is enough for stable spatially periodic patterns cell.com/cell-systems/retrie…
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Cell comm pathways (BMP, Wnt, etc) use many ligand & receptor variants in combinations. Ligands can behave in weirdly “contextual” ways, replacing each other in one process but not another. What’s the logic+function of these pervasive bewildering systems? 2 new preprints…
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Hard to believe it’s almost 2 decades since I was served, and later consumed, this molecularly precise model of a gram negative bacterium. The model captures 3 features of the cell:
- high protein density, but low molecule number
- carbohydrate surface
- cheese in periplasm
🌯 BIOLOGY IS A BURRITO 🌯
Cells are crowded and very fast places. It's a miracle that anything works at all.
The central dogma is often depicted as DNA -> RNA -> proteins, but it's so much more: A biophysical marvel inside the smallest of vessels. 💓
open.substack.com/pub/cell/p…
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Synthetic biology could enable new types of programmable therapeutics. Our new preprint introduces synthetic protein circuits that selectively trigger cell death in Ras-mutant cancer cells, with interesting advantages compared to existing approaches.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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What does it take to generate and control multiple cell states? To find out, we designed and built "MultiFate", a synthetic circuit that generates multistability in mammalian cells. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…. Work from brilliant student @RonZhu2015 w/ @jesusdelrio_7 and @jgojalvo.
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“Micropublications” Love this idea. Not every useful result needs to be a gigantic paper… micropublication.org
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The new building, from freakishly sterile fantasy to teeming fertile reality (Image: @jeriscience)
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Two decades ago @AvigdorEldar & @BarkaiLab introduced concept of shuttling, in which protein circuits push morphogens away from their source, or smush them into narrower regions. We have now reconstituted shuttling in mammalian cell culture: science.org/doi/10.1126/scia….
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Our new paper on “synpoptosis” circuits, led by the amazing @ShiyuXia, is now out: sciencedirect.com/science/ar… (1/3)
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Shh...Cells reconstitute morphogen gradients. New system you watch gradients develop in space and time. With some rewiring, shows how odd architectural features of the hedgehog pathway together enable precise patterning. science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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Our work on synthetic mammalian circuits for cell population control now out: cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…. First, credit to the amazing team of @ma_yitong and @markwbudde, and collab with Michaëlle Mayalu (just starting her lab at Stanford) and Richard Murray.
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In case it's helpful to anyone, I posted the evolving set of talk tips that I share with my lab on our website. Scroll to bottom of this page: elowitz.caltech.edu/teaching.
(It was once "10 commandments" but has since expanded to 25...the slide titles are currently number 5)
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Our new preprint describes lineage motifs—over-represented patterns of cell fates on lineage trees. For us biologists, motifs reveal cell fate control programs. For developing tissues, they could set, modulate, or evolve cell fate composition. biorxiv.org/lookup/content/s…
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New DREAM challenge to figure out how to reconstruct lineage histories from genomic recording systems in cells: alleninstitute.org/what-we-d…
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A chompact, and not too chomplicated, synthetic protein chomputation system, based on the principle of chomposability. science.sciencemag.org/conte…
Chompliments to Xiaojing Gao & Lucy Chong!
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New synthetic mammalian circuits that allow cells to sense & control their own pop size: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…, Led by brilliant @ma_yitong and @markwbudde w/Michaëlle Mayalu, Junqin Zhu & Richard Murray.
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“What’s past is prologue” — excited about chromatin recording by synthetically engineering recruitment of adenine methyltransferases in living cells. Will enable one to correlate past states with subsequent fate decisions. New work from the virtuosic @yodai_takei See thread.
I'm excited to share our new preprint on LagTag, a method that recovers both past and present chromatin states from the same mammalian cells.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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Notch pathway has more than one “channel”. Using dynamics, each ligands activates diff targets and fates. cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…
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Excited to have lineage motifs out in the world. Hoping the concept and methods can be useful in various developmental systems as more lineage data become available. Congratulations to @tranmartink and @AskaryLab on the work, and thanks to Adara Koivula and @Wonderstrucksci for the cover image.
Online now: Lineage motifs as developmental modules for control of cell type proportions dlvr.it/T2lKM6
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New preprint: Networks of dimerizing proteins turn out to be powerful computational systems. In tweetorial form here by @JacobParresAu, who led this work with @BenEmert, Matt Levine, and Andrew Stuart.
Out now on @biorxivpreprint!
In my first project in the @ElowitzLab, we explore how competitive, "many-to-many" dimerization allows complex, multi-input, and cell-type-specific biochemical computations🧵↓
doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.30.5…
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A stochastic epigenetic event controls T cell fate. 2 colors show Bcl11b loci undergo independent all/none fate-specfyng events. At end of the day (several days in this case), just a roll of the (epigenetic) dice. Congrats Hao Yuan Kueh,Ellen Rothenberg biorxiv.org/content/early/20…
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Amazing new paper from Gurol Suel & co shows that 'physiologically inactive' bacterial spores use an ion-based "integrate and fire" mechanism to germinate in response to signals. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Wild σ factor dynamics in B.subtilis, visualized in space-time (2 factors in red&green) [Jin Park]: cell.com/cell-systems/fullte…
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Computation shows that stable single morphogen patterns can be initiated by transient perturbations, and made robust to noise through additional intracellular feedbacks or by operating on growing tissues.
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Quibbler is a stunning experience for data analysis & modeling. Regular Python plots+images become immediately interactive without added code. Much else besides. Transparent, beautifully designed to enable analysis as it can and should be done. Congrats @RoyKishony & team
Excited to launch Quibbler, an open-source Python package for interactive data analysis. Fun to use. Nothing to learn. Your standard code effortlessly comes to life! With the amazing Maor Kern, @kmaork. github.com/Technion-Kishony-…, #python, #data
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Why do ligands and receptors interact promiscuously? To generate promiscuity-based computation. Our new paper: authors.elsevier.com/a/1Vh2g…
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Predicting antibiotic resistance with big data: amazing what you can predict from 700,000 UTIs and 6,000,000 drug purchases: biorxiv.org/content/early/20…
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sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Bio-inspired synbio: Benenson & colleagues show how to make transcriptional OR (& other) mammalian logic from multiple promoters, each with its own first exon, spliced to common subsequent exon, a design that appears in endog genes.
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Thank you @NikoMcCarty for a stimulating conversation about synthetic biology!
And congratulations on all the beautiful writing at @AsimovPress
These are my 5 top takeaways from the @ElowitzLab interview that we published today.
1. Elowitz made one of the first synthetic gene circuits, called the repressilator. His publication helped establish synthetic biology.
But he originally called the circuit the "oscillon"!🧵
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New essay on potential of synthetic cytokine circuits
Learning to speak the secret language of immune cells could improve immunotherapies, argues a new #SciMagPerspective: fcld.ly/d0kplr0
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Thanks @Devbiokonstanz for the excellent perspective. Love the musical chord analogy.
Preview in @CellSystemsCP by @Devbiokonstanz on the latest study from @ElowitzLab - Key signaling pathways seem to use their components in only a handful of combinations, suggesting that they operate in specific modes - similar to selecting specific chords from musical scales.
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Astonishing AI system can write original papers from data sets, and does so in a way that is fully and easily human-auditable.
1/n Can LLMs perform scientific research? And, can they do so while enhancing key scientific values including transparency, traceability & verifiability? Check out our preprint on the "data-to-paper" platform. w the amazing @TalIfargan @LostInTranscrip arxiv.org/abs/2404.17605
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Wow - such stunning findings, and so beautifully written.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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We were surprised to find that an individual cell can activate its own Notch receptors. cis-activation coexists with cis-inhibition. New mode of Notch signaling from Leah Santat and Sandy Nandagopal. biorxiv.org/content/early/20…
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Important step towards answering the basic and fascinating question of what functions chromatin regulation offers compared to conventional gene regulation.
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Really enjoyed talking with @stevenstrogatz about synthetic biology on his Joy of Wh(y) podcast
What if we could program cells to attack cancer more efficiently? Learn more on the new episode of The Joy of Why, a Quanta podcast hosted by @StevenStrogatz. listen.quantamagazine.org/jo… Transcript: quantamagazine.org/can-we-pr…
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Intrigued to learn about this work from @alan_garfinkel rebooting math education for life sciences, basing it on bio-relevant dynamical systems. Seems like such an engaging and effective way to do it: link.springer.com/article/10…
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Fantastic thread/article on the most important yet still oddly under-discussed aspect of research.
How to pick a problem. Today in @CellCellPress. 1/53
cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…
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An absolutely amazing book
Why do we get certain diseases whereas others do not exist?
This new book builds a foundation for systems medicine. Starting from basic laws, it derives why hormone, immune and aging circuits are built the way the are, culminating in a periodic table of diseases.
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@Caltech is searching for faculty in developmental and organismal biology. The job posting can be found here: applications.caltech.edu/job…. Deadline: September 30, 2023. Caltech is a wonderful place for research.
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This is a fantastic series — starting with fantastic pair of talks this Wednesday -- register now, if you have not already.
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We are searching for a technician to develop MEMOIR, a system for recording and reconstructing cellular histories. Please RT. chm.tbe.taleo.net/chm03/ats/…
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Cell communication more sophisticated than we thought (Notch transmits multiple messages) doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.… Image: S. Nandagopal
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Gorgeous work! The precision of repressilator 2.0 is astonishing, and I love the ingenuity and creativity of extracting phase information from colonies, and then using that assay to extract information about growth in mouse gut. wowie zowie! congrats!!
Excited and proud to share our #preprint using the classic #syntheticbiology oscillator - the repressilator - to measure bacterial growth at #singlecell level in the mammalian gut. w/ @pamsterdance at @wyssinstitute & @HMS_SysBio biorxiv.org/content/early/20…
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Such a fun meeting...but it did get a little heated.
Fun memories from the 2018 EMBO Workshop on 'In-situ Methods in Cell Biology & Cellular Biophysics' in Berlin. Mike @ElowitzLab and Uri @UriAlonWeizmann discussing heaven and hell.
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EasyFlow has been extremely useful in our lab for analysis of flow cytometry data). Hope others find it useful as well. Developed by @ma_yitong and @yaronantebi
Tired of looking for THE dongle to analyze your flow? Don't want to learn coding just to use (amazing) free flow analysis packages?
Here I present the open-source, coding-free (it's a GUI) flow analysis packages I worked on during my PhD in @ElowitzLab:
ym3141.github.io/EasyFlowQ/
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This version of Figure 4 should fully address all reviewer comments. Thanks to @HeidiKlumpe and Christina Su for this going away cake for @yaronantebi, and congratulations to Yaron, who will be starting a new lab at Weizmann soon.
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Super excited: Primordium is addressing a major, often unrecognized (until it’s too late), failure point throughout molecular biology, by allowing fast reliable full-plasmid sequencing. Thrilled to see the incomparably creative @markwbudde make it happen, and help along the way
I'm excited to announce I'm leaving Caltech for my dream of building a synthetic biology company. Along with a great group of people, including the brilliant @ElowitzLab, we founded @PrimordiumLabs with the sole purpose of accelerating cutting-edge synthetic biology research. 1/
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In biology, slow responses can be as (sometimes more) challenging to explain as rapid ones. Cool work providing a new understanding of how temperatures can be integrated over seasonal timescales by coupling to cell division / dilution.
Our new paper describes a novel mechanism of temperature sensing in plants! @CarolineDeanLab @JohnInnesCentre @GEN_ISP_JIC @nature
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Our 2019 lab t-shirt provides a fanciful, figurative view of our recent synthetic protein circuits. science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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Cell systems cover is Jin Park’s kymograph of sigma factor dynamics in the mother machine: cell.com/cell-systems/fullte…
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Looking for talented and motivated scientists to work on therapeutic biological circuits.
TODAY IS THE DAY! I’m unbelievably excited to announce that today I start leading a group @Caltech to apply synthetic biology circuits for human therapies w/ @elowitzlab. And we are hiring.
phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/…
ALT Join the Therapeutic Circuits Group in the Elowitz lab @Caltech
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Holy guacacoli! Amazing and beautiful use of the repressilator in the mammalian gut.
Our paper "Bacterial variability in the mammalian gut captured by a single-cell synthetic oscillator" was published today. Hooray!
#syntheticbiology #microbiome #singlecell
@wyssinstitute @harvardmed @HFSP @MenziesFdation @nhmrc
Thread for synopsis 1/8
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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Still giggling, @UriAlonWeizmann
Our new paper is out in @nchembio where we describe our journey from a #covalent fragment screen to an in vivo active Pin1 inhibitor. nature.com/articles/s41589-0…
Below is a musical abstract guest-starring @UriAlonWeizmann and a tweetorial 1/n
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Structure: Measuring ligand interactions in cells with different receptor profiles organizes BMP ligands into ‘equivalence groups’ (donuts) that vary w/receptor context, explain developmental phenomena, and can arise from ligand-receptor interactions. biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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Developmental Biology: Morphogen in a Dish -- Thanks @jpvincentlab for the excellent perspective piece cell.com/current-biology/abs… on our reconstituted Sonic Hedgehog gradient system science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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Programmable protein circuit design (review)
Happy to report that the review article by @ElowitzLab and I is now open access 🆓 cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…
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Function: Ligand combos are message “addressing” systems that can selectively activate different cell type(s) based on receptor expression. Outperforms 1-1 signaling arch. Works b/c ligand-receptor interactions “compute” complex responses.(Theory paper) biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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Beautiful paper from @sandynandagopal , Galit Lahav & colleagues. a seemingly “messy” circuit of dimerizing proteins (bHLH factors) can process a combinatorial input signals. Important step in more systematically understanding biological signal processing
How does one (signaling) arm know what the other is doing in the cell? Through a network of bHLH transcription factors obviously! Our work showing how neural stem cells integrate signals to coordinate a fate response is now out: cell.com/cell-reports/fullte…
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Congratulations Pulin. Super excited for you! (And will miss you - but luckily Boston is never far in scienceland).
Developmental and synthetic biologist @Pulin_Li joins @WhiteheadInst in May as its newest member. “Pulin’s insightful work has demonstrated that she is just the kind of pathbreaking scientist we prize at Whitehead Institute,” says Director David Page. ow.ly/9lJH50oSjxm
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Beautiful work showing how chromatin based epigenetic regulation can generate developmental timers. Congratulations Kueh & co.!
Finally – it’s out!! Thrilled about our new paper, on a timed epigenetic switch controlling the T-cell fate decision. This study was co-led by the dynamic experiment/theory duo @nickApease and Sam Nguyen. (1/n)
cell.com/cell-reports/fullte…
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Wonderful to have intMEMOIR out now. It provides a versatile way to reconstruct reconstruct lineage relationships along side cell state & location by imaging. If you’re interested in applying to your system and we can help, please let us know.
So excited to share our publication today! Working with the awesome @markwbudde, A. Granados, and other brilliant minds in the @ElowitzLab, Lois Lab, and @LongCai_Lab, we developed a synthetic recording system to image single cell lineage history. science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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Thrilled about our new Allen Discovery Center with @JShendure, Alex Schier, Long Cai, Carlos Lois, @coletrapnell, and Marshall Horwitz!
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We systematically engineered a toolbox of miRNA-based circuits. In these systems, cells with more gene copies transcribe more mRNA, but proportionally reduce expression per copy due to the miRNA. The circuits maintain roughly constant expression across two orders of magnitude of gene dosage, while allowing tuning of set-point over a similar range. They also function in multiple cell lines. Thus, one can deliver genes using a “messy” but convenient approach like transient transfection or AAV, and still achieve a desired expression level.
We term the circuits DIMMERs (Dosage-Invariant miRNA-Mediated Expression Regulators).
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Truly spectacular new paper from @LongCai_Lab
How do cells change during development or in disease? Researchers at our Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing at @UWMedicine including @LongCai_Lab, developed a new sequencing technique, dubbed #seqFISH, which can help to better answer this question.
alleninstitute.org/what-we-d…
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In Su et al, “Ligand-receptor promiscuity enables cellular addressing” we show how promiscuous architectures counter-intuitively enable ligand combinations to selectively activate (“address”) specific cell types or cell type combinations: doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2022.…
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A synbio event: ADAR systems repurposed to create elegant, designable sense-process-respond systems all directly at the RNA level. Beautiful work from @SynBioGaoLab & co., and parallel study from @jgooten, @insitubiology, & co. Congrats to all!
As we work towards DNA-free circuits, we realized we could use some new RNA sensors in living cells. So we built RADAR biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… Congrats to Eerik, @katznoa1, @NatalieSKolber, @claytoncalli, and thanks to our plant biologist neighbors, Diego, Will, and @Sattely_lab
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Thanks you Maarten. This clarified everything for me! Only wish I could have followed this advice, or not followed it, earlier in my career.
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Rob is a true original and an inspiration.
Congratulations to Rob Phillips, who was recently awarded Caltech's top prize for excellence in teaching. One nominator cited Phillips's "remarkable ability to make scientific discovery feel special." ow.ly/S8aB50DOqys
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Really looking forward!
The Engineering Life Initiative @LMU_Muenchen will kick off on April 8! Four talks with @cees_dekker, @KortemmeLab, @ElowitzLab, @TreutleinLab, and a panel discussion on the future of engineering life.
Info and free registration: engineering-life.de
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Excited about this beautiful book, and its lively contents…
Our first book about scientific progress, Origins, is now available.
We learned a lot about printing—and starting a magazine—while creating this book. So we decided to write an essay about it!
Buy the book, support our work, and learn more. 🔻
press.asimov.com/resources/l…
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Our new 2021 Lab t-shirt is finally here, better late than never. A re-do, representing the seven states of the synthetic multistable MultiFate circuit science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Special thanks also to @sysbiosig for excellent preview of the papers: doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2022.… and to @maayanvisuals for the cover image, which represents the tangled wiring of promiscuous protein interaction systems.
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Congratulations @seanmcarroll, from one of your countless fans…
Congratulations to @seanmcarroll for his election as a 2020 AAAS Fellow for his distinguished contributions to cosmology, gravity, and dark matter research, as well as exceptional contributions in communicating and promoting science to the public. 👏🥳
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Fold-change detection, key design principle for gene circuits (& other things)-newly reviewed by Adler+Alon: authors.elsevier.com/sd/arti…
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Exciting opportunity. Xiaojing Gao will be leaving to start his synthetic biology lab at Stanford next year —
Excited to announce the opening of my lab in Stanford ChemE next April! Tinkering with molecular circuits, viral vectors, and human cells for new biomedical solutions. Partners in crime wanted: students, postdocs, collaborators… More at gaolab.blog
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In Klumpe et al, we systematically analyzed pairs of BMP signaling to cells w/different BMP receptor combos. Different ligands can act equivalently with respect to one receptor context but quite differently with respect to another... doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2022.…
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Congratulations to the amazing Pulin Li & Joe Markson, as well as Sheng Wang for this work!!
Shh...Cells reconstitute morphogen gradients. New system you watch gradients develop in space and time. With some rewiring, shows how odd architectural features of the hedgehog pathway together enable precise patterning. science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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I just love the great writing, beautiful books (and now...the capsule!) that @NikoMcCarty and others at @AsimovPress are creating.
Our second book is now available for pre-order. 🎉
Embracing the book's technology theme, we did something special:
We encoded the entire book into DNA & packaged it into stainless steel capsules, where it will live for tens of thousands of years.
1,000 copies were made... 🧵
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Congratulations @Amjad_Askary…and UCLA! To those looking for labs, this is an amazing opportunity to work with a truly brilliant & inspiring mentor. (& so happy to have you just a stone’s throw away here in L.A. …)
Beyond excited to announce that I will be joining the MCDB Department @UCLA this summer. My lab will seek to find out how cell fate is specified during development and how we can take control of this process, leveraging advances in synthetic biology and spatial transcriptomics.
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Wow. These effector domains will be extremely useful for synthetic biology. Congratulations on the excellent and exciting work @BintuLacra & team
We're proud to announce our latest preprint, "High-Throughput Discovery and Characterization of Viral Transcriptional Effectors in Human Cells", out now on biorxiv biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…! [1/7]
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Really fun working on this protein circuit review with @ZiboChen. It is amazing to think about the potential and see how fast the field is advancing.
How can we design protein-level circuits in cells by programming proteins and their interactions? @ElowitzLab and I attempt to establish design principles, highlight past work, and suggest future directions in this review: authors.elsevier.com/a/1cue7…
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Really excited about this upcoming meeting — latest and greatest on engineered recording systems in cells.
Hear from leading researchers in the fields of cell lineage and developmental recording at Hindsight 2020 - The Allen Institute Developmental Recording Symposium on Nov. 18.
Learn more & register for this virtual event: alleninstitute.org/hindsight…
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Work of many brilliant scientists: @HeidiKlumpe, @ChristinaJSu, @yaronantebi, @murugan_chicago, James Linton, and others.
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Explaining how silencing affects the X, the whole X, and nothing but the X. Congratulations Joanna, Mackenzie, Mitch, and the rest of the team.
Why are lncRNAs lowly expressed? How can they regulate their more abundant targets? In our new preprint we explore how these features are balanced to ensure target specificity and robust gene regulation via a spatial amplification mechanism (biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…)
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This is a stunning piece of work that shows that developmental patterning can work in unexpected and beautiful ways. Beauty here refers to both the movies and the mechanism.
How do hair cells in the inner ear form such an organized pattern? Really excited to share our recent work in @NatureComms nature.com/articles/s41467-0…. Amazing work led by Roie Cohen and Liat Amir-Zilberstein from the lab in collaboration with @KarenAvraham @ftsven @fumio_matsuzaki
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