Quails across the scales: quantitative live imaging of development.

Hosted by: Dr Steve Lee

Abstract

Understanding how an initially homogenous population of cells organises into tissues and forms an embryo is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. Processes occurring across multiple scales must be precisely coordinated: from individual gene expression to the behaviour of single cells, to the forces driving the simultaneous movement of thousands of cells. Using quantitative live imaging technologies, we visualise and investigate how these dynamic mechanisms control tissue formation and cell fate in vivo. However, live analysis of post-implantation development is largely inaccessible in mouse embryos and other more accessible model organisms do not recapitulate important aspects of human morphogenesis.

We have recently set up a new transgenic quail model that enables both live imaging of embryogenesis and replicates key morphogenetic events of early human development. Due to its rapid development, easy accessibility within the egg and relative transparency, the quail embryo is an excellent model system for live imaging. We have generated a variety of transgenic lines and optimised imaging approaches to investigate the dynamic processes driving early embryo morphogenesis. By studying how mechanical forces are generated and transmitted at the cellular and tissue scales, we aim to understand the formation of the neural tube and reveal how the nervous system is established in real-time.

Biography

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Dr Melanie White is an ARC Future Fellow and the head of the Dynamics of Morphogenesis lab at the Institute of Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. She completed her PhD at University College London followed by postdoctoral research at The University of Edinburgh, Monash University and A*STAR in Singapore. Her highly interdisciplinary work revealed key mechanisms driving the earliest morphogenetic events in embryogenesis and was published in Cell, Science, Nature Cell Biology, Developmental Cell and Nature Protocols. Dr White’s research has been featured on the cover of multiple journals including Cell and she was awarded the inaugural American Society for Cell Biology Porter Prize for Research Excellence (2018). Her lab utilises quantitative live imaging approaches in a novel transgenic quail model and 3D in vitro human stem cells models. They aim to understand how molecular, cellular, and mechanical processes are dynamically integrated to direct tissue morphogenesis during development and disease.