The development of a fertilized egg into a complex multicellular organism requires a delicate control between specification and proliferation of cells. It has been mostly through the use of model organisms that we begin to understand how the differential expression of selector genes, acting together with a limited set of signaling pathways, governs the differentiation of cells into distinct types. Nevertheless, the processes that coordinate the specification of different cell types and their proliferation are still poorly understood.

 

 

In our lab we study the mechanisms that ensure the coordination between specification and growth during the development of the eye. One of our objectives is to functionally describe, at a whole genome level, a precise transition undergone by the fruit fly (Drosophila) eye primordium cells: the transit from a multipotent, asynchronously proliferating state into a state in which cells transiently stop their cell cycle and commit as eye cells. Another of our objectives is to analyze to what extent the paradigms we uncover in Drosophila are conserved during evolution, by testing our findings in the fly during the development of the zebrafish (D. rerio) eye.