Nicoletta Petridou, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, received an ERC Starting Grant for her innovative work on embryonic development.
Nicoletta Petridou, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, was awarded an ERC Starting Grant 2024. Photo credit: Nicoletta Petridou
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Nicoletta Petridou, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, an ERC Starting Grant for her project titled ‘Collective Regulation of Cell Decisions’ (CoRe).
The Petridou Group investigates how collective tissue properties emerge during early embryonic development, working across diverse disciplines, including biophysics, quantitative biology, comparative embryology, and synthetic biology.
The ERC Starting Grant will support the Petridou Group in studying the role of tissue physical properties in different cellular decision-making processes. During their life, all cells must make critical decisions – whether to divide, move, differentiate, or die – by decoding signals from their surrounding microenvironment. However, in a developing organism, these decisions are also influenced by the global macroenvironment of the tissue these cells are embedded in. How tissue-scale properties like geometry, porosity, or stiffness impact these choices, is still largely elusive.
The Petridou Group will tackle this question by harnessing the physics of collective behaviour as design principles for in vivo synthetic developmental biology. Using knowledge from physics, they will gain insight into how certain tissue properties emerge and use this information to design synthetic biology tools to engineer the desired tissue properties within living embryos.
“When I submitted this grant I was quite scared,” recalled Petridou. “Biophysics has been long used to describe complex tissue behaviours, but using physics as a compass to engineer tissues of precisely controlled physical properties, and within the developing embryo, is unconventional. I am deeply grateful to those who believed in this idea and I am excited to realise this work.”
With this achievement, Nicoletta Petridou joins a long list of EMBL scientists with projects successfully funded by the ERC. Since its foundation in 2007, the ERC has become one of the main European funding organisations promoting outstanding research across the continent. Among the 494 awardees this year, there is also EMBL alumnus Yury Bykov, who was a postdoc in the Briggs Group within the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg from 2013-2018 and is now a group leader at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU).
