Project description
Modeling how tissues take shape in embryos
Animals develop from a single fertilised egg into complex organisms through well-conserved embryonic processes. While single-cell genomics has offered insights into cellular differentiation, creating models to explain this robustness remains challenging. The ERC-funded EmbryoAxes project will develop algorithms to analyse the dynamics of differentiating tissues using spatial, temporal, and lineage-resolved data. By modelling tissues as groups of interacting cells that follow transcriptional, epigenetic, and signalling pathways, the project will reconstruct cell trajectories during gastrulation and early organogenesis. These trajectories will inform models predicting changes in a cell’s state based on various molecular factors. Using zebrafish embryos for high-throughput studies, the project will systematically test these models through combinatorial perturbations and multi-omics analysis.
Objective
One of the most remarkable processes in biology is how animals develop from a single fertilized egg within a short time of rapid growth and an explosion in spatial and cellular diversity. Embryonic development is highly deterministic and consistent among different embryos and conserved across species. Astonishingly, embryos reuse the same signaling pathways in diverse developmental contexts to robustly pattern tissues. The advent of single-cell genomics in the last decade has allowed to chart the phenomenology of cellular differentiation at unprecedented resolution and scale. Yet, moving from such single-cell descriptions to models of how embryonic tissues achieve robustness and precision in their differentiation remains exceedingly difficult.
To this end, we will develop new algorithms that will infer the spatiotemporal dynamics of differentiating tissues from space-, time- and lineage-resolved data. Tissues will be modelled as groups of proliferating and interacting cells distributed in space and moving along transcriptional, epigenetic and signaling manifolds. Focusing on the developmental stages of gastrulation and early organogenesis, we will reconstruct the spatiotemporal trajectories of cells together with the dynamics of their local niches. These trajectories will serve as the input to mathematical models that will predict local changes in a cell’s state from its signalome, epigenome and transcription factor repertoire. Using zebrafish embryos as a high-throughput system of vertebrate development, we will systematically test these models through time-dependent, combinatorial perturbations with a multiomic read-out. My overall goal is to develop quantitative, data-based models of how transcriptional, epigenetic and intercellular changes at the cellular level translate into robust and deterministic dynamics at the tissue level and to apply these methods to dissect how positional information and cell fate commitment emerges in the vertebrate embryo.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics epigenetics epigenomes
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine embryology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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13125 Berlin
Germany
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