Our lab is dedicated to understanding the complex choreography of cells as they organize during early animal development, giving rise to diverse organ morphologies. We achieve these through genetic manipulation, advanced microscopy, and computational data analysis, in two different model systems: the mouse skeletal system, and the early fruit fly embryo.
Most of our work involves analyzing high-resolution live microscopy data, or “biological movies,” which capture developing tissues in remarkable detail. This level of visual complexity exceeds our ability to analyze with the naked eye. To overcome this challenge, we develop advanced image processing and machine learning algorithms that can sift through the data, identify biologically interesting events, summarize them, and visualize them in a variety of ways. One of our major goals is to create algorithms capable of reconstructing the complete cell lineage tree of the early fruit fly embryo.
