About his postdoctoral project

Metazoan develop from a single fertilized egg. This process involves the spatio-temporal unfolding of the cell lineage tree into an organized shape with functional parts. The sequence of events leading to the precise positioning of individual cells with the required fate is orchestrated by gene regulation within and between cells, cell proliferation and rearrangements as well as global morphological changes. Even though various parts of these processes have been elucidated, a generic framework that would capture the interactions between them is still missing. We propose to describe a developing organism as an evolving graph where each cell correspond to a node, spatial relationships are encoded as the edges and transcriptomic state as label on the nodes. We will explore how the action of cell proliferation, spatial rearrangement and differentiation dynamics affect the characteristics of these graphs using published data and modeling in the development of the worm C. elegans.