Systems Biology of Stem Cell Differentiation

A major problem in developmental biology is to understand how stem cells and other multipotent precursor cells are flexible, and thus able to generate different cell types, while stably maintaining those cell-types once their fate has been determined.

While it is clear that differentiation into distinct cell types is carefully orchestrated by the cell gene regulatory network, we also investigate the relevance of stochastic fluctuations of gene expression within those networks in the process.

We adopt an integrated approach, based on genetic manipulation and mathematical modelling to shed light on this fundamental problem.

We acknowledge support from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.