Critical points and transitions in embryo development
The Petridou group aims to understand how complexity arises during early embryo development by focusing on the emergence and function of collective tissue properties. To do so, we combine diverse disciplines including comparative embryology, biophysics, statistical mechanics, quantitative and synthetic biology.
Our PhD student Magdalena Schindler got the chance to attend a workshop on Early Embryonic Cell Divisions by the Company of Biologists; the perfect topic for her project. Together with other attendees, she summarised the highlights and outcomes of the meeting – check the summary article!
Our student Lena won an award for the best contribution during the recent Theory@EMBL retreat. Her talk presented her work on the effects of cell cleavage rounds on the tissue material state.
With the new predoc course, Diana just joined our group as a predoctoral fellow. Having recently graduated from Sorbonne University in neuroscience, she is excited to learn about physics in early developmental processes during her next career step with us!
Thanks to Camilla’s and Jun-Ru’s organisation, the group enjoyed a team-building experience of a brewery tour. We also played a role-playing game where we got to hunt for lost data on the way. Our reward was fish tube-holders for the whole team!
Jun-Ru Lee joins the group as postdoctoral fellow. His work will aim to understand the function of the interstitial fluid between the cells, which is vital for embryo development yet very poorly characterised until now.
Yuting received an EIPOD fellowship to fund her postdoctoral studies in the Petridou group (EMBL, Heidelberg) and the Saka Group (EMBL, Heidelberg). She will combine expertise from both groups to study transcriptional and tissue material changes during EMT in a developing system.