Quantitative Developmental Biology

Development is the process by which the fertilised egg, a single cell, transforms into a fully functional multicellular organism. During this transformation, all basic cellular processes – from the cycle of each cell division to the formation of individual organs – need to be precisely coordinated in time and space. Our team uses an interdisciplinary strategy with focus on live-imaging approaches to understand how the collective action of gene networks and environmental factors drives the emergence of biological shapes and patterns. Ultimately, we would like to reveal evolutionary conserved principles of patterning in metazoan development and expose novel mechanisms underlying developmental precision and robustness.