WELCOME TO THE PARÉ LAB

Developmental Genetics meets Cell Biology

How does an organism construct itself?

All complex multicellular organisms were, at some point in time, a single cell. In humans, a fertilized egg becomes two cells, then four, then eight…eventually creating the 10 trillion or so cells that make up an adult. But animals aren’t just big blobs of cells. As they divide, groups of cells organize themselves into intricate, three-dimensional structures that will eventually become our organs and tissues. To perform these amazing feats, cells must somehow sense their spatial orientation with respect to the global body axes (head-to-tail, belly-to-back) and then use that information to alter their shape and position. However, the molecular mechanisms that link spatial orientation to changes in cell shape and behavior are not well understood.

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We are using the Drosophila embryo as a developmental model to study how large groups of cells coordinate their movements during tissue reorganization. The embryo begins as a simple football-shaped monolayer of cells that then undergoes a number of dramatic topological changes. In particular, we are interested in determining how cell-surface proteins are employed to send and receive spatial information about the head-to-tail axis to organize cell movements during tissue elongation and folding. We believe these studies will uncover conserved paradigms of cellular communication and behavior that will be relevant to tissue development, cancer metastasis, and wound repair across different biological contexts.