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Research

Research

BDR researchers coming from diverse research fields are working together to achieve higher goals.

Seminars & Symposia

Seminars & Symposia

BDR hosts annual symposium and regular seminars inviting international scientists in life science.

Careers & Study

Careers & Study

BDR embraces people from diverse backgrounds, and strives to create an open and supportive setting for research.

Outreach

Outreach

BDR communicates the appeal and significance of our research to society through the use of various media and activities.

News

News

From research, events, people and everything in between, find out what’s going on at RIKEN BDR.

About Us

About Us

Exploring the scientific foundations of life through interdisciplinary approaches to address society’s problems.

Photo of unit leder, Miki Ebisuya

Unit Leader
Miki Ebisuya Ph.D.

[Closed Mar. 2019]

Reconstituting developmental mechanisms to better understand them

In our lab, we strive to create or reconstitute multicellular developmental mechanisms. Our aim of reconstitution is to test the sufficiency of current understandings of mechanisms of interest, as well as to discover unexplained or unexpected elements through observation. The fundamental principles of development include cell autonomous differentiation, spatio-temporal pattern formation and tissue deformation. Thus, we have been trying to reconstitute these principles one by one and so far succeeded in reconstituting cell autonomous differentiation. Namely, we created an artificial gene circuit mimicking Delta-Notch lateral inhibition in mammalian cell culture, causing spontaneous bifurcation of initially identical cells into two different cell types (Matsuda et al, Nat Commun 2015). Now we are working on the reconstitution of reaction-diffusion pattern formation, intercellular synchronized oscillation and 3D-tissue deformation. Artificially reconstituted systems also have the advantage of facilitating measurements and the modification of parameters, which we hope will contribute to the quantitative understanding of developmental principles.

A cell colony showing a salt-and-pepper pattern of red cells and green cells (Left: Cells engineered with a synthetic gene circuit, Right: Simulation)

Research Theme

  • Reconstitution of cell autonomous differentiation
  • Reconstitution of cell pattern formation
  • Reconstitution of synchronized oscillation
  • Reconstitution of tissue deformation

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