Martínez Ara, Guillermo (Date of defense: 2022-09-19)
During embryonic development, cellular forces synchronize in space and time to generate functional tissue shapes. Apical constriction is a force-generating process necessary to provoke the folding of ...
Häkkinen, Hanna-Maria (Date of defense: 2022-07-01)
Cellular errors can spontaneously occur during vertebrate embryo development and can lead to apoptosis. Recent work in our lab revealed a novel function of the embryonic epithelium as an efficient ...
Cuenca-Ardura, Mirabai (Date of defense: 2024-01-19)
HNF1A encodes a key transcription factor in insulin-secreting beta cells from pancreatic islets. Heterozygous mutations in HNF1A cause monogenic diabetes, and hypomorphic variants in HNF1A increase ...
Pezzano, Fabio (Date of defense: 2022-06-13)
Cells commonly live in a crowded environment, in a tissue or in a developing embryo. The extracellular matrix and/or surrounding neighboring cells can impose physical deformations to which cells need ...
Galán i Palma, Luis (Date of defense: 2023-03-22)
Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) have the ability to self-renew and give rise to almost every somatic cell type. Because of their enormous potential as a tool for regenerative medicine, understanding ...
Belmonte Mateos, Carla (Date of defense: 2022-02-03)
Precise regulation of neurogenesis is achieved by differentially allocating the neurogenic competence along the tissue. In the hindbrain proneural gene expression is stereotypically confined in segment ...
Laguillo Diego, Alejandra (Date of defense: 2021-03-12)
During cell division, microtubules (MTs) organize into a bipolar spindle that drives faithful chromosome segregation through the kinetochore fibers (k-fibers), bundles of parallel MTs that attach the ...
Tolosa Ramon, Queralt (Date of defense: 2023-07-26)
The outer epithelial layer is the first cell type that emerges during development, providing essential mechanical protection and is indispensable for morphogenesis. Here, we study how the interplay ...
Engel-Pizcueta, Carolyn (Date of defense: 2023-04-28)
The generation of cell diversity in the embryonic brain relies on the balance between cell proliferation and differentiation. The hindbrain boundary cells specify at the interface between adjacent ...
Kozyczkowska, Aleksandra (Date of defense: 2022-03-11)
To address one of the most fascinating questions in the history of life, the origin of animal multicellularity, we needed experimentally tractable representatives from each of the unicellular lineages, ...