Understanding how key genes are controlled during early mammalian development, orchestrating the emergence of embryonic forms, remains one of the fundamental questions in biology today.
With the aim of addressing this question in a multidisciplinary and quantitative way, two French teams (Institut Pasteur and Collège de France) and an Austrian team, bringing together physicists specializing in gene expression and mathematical modeling, as well as geneticists and molecular biologists, have received a prestigious SYNERGY grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
The project, which will run for six years, will use as analysis material new types of pseudo-embryos entirely derived from stem cells, produced and cultured in vitro. This new type of biological object should not only enable us to study these fundamental phenomena at all the necessary resolution scales, from direct microscopic observation inside the cell nucleus to the most advanced molecular analysis of chromosomes, but also to understand these complex processes dynamically.
