A conserved POU4-dependent developmental program underlies mechanosensory neuron regeneration in adult planarians.

Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.

The evolutionary conservation of cell types over deep time has long been theorised but remains difficult to demonstrate. Monoaminergic neurons, which produce molecules such as serotonin and dopamine, ...

Casey Dunn's laboratory in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.

Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.

Species from diverse animal lineages have conserved groups of orthologous genes together on the same chromosome for over half a billion years since the last common ancestor of bilaterians. Although no...

Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...