Research Interests

To the natural philosopher, there is no natural object unimportant or trifling… a soap bubble… an apple… a pebble…
He walks in the midst of wonders.
- John Herschel, 1830

There is a paradox. Signaling between cells is crucial in animal physiology, and yet, there aren’t actually that many signaling pathways in animal cells. According to last count, only about a handful of signaling pathways function in early embryogenesis. The very small number of pathways contrasts with the unimaginably diverse processes in which they participate. Moreover, these few signaling pathways are highly conserved in animal cells. Why are so few enough?

Our challenge is to understand the properties of these signaling pathways. We are interested in understanding the molecular components of these pathways, as well as the properties to which the molecular architecture as a whole gives rise. We are interested in understanding what the pathways do, as well as what they can do—even in the parameter regime unexplored by the cells, because this may be a critical factor during evolution when new environmental challenges arise.

With theoretical and experimental work on the canonical Wnt pathway, we are beginning to build insights into what allows this pathway to be so conserved in evolution and yet so versatile in function. The current work in the lab is divided into: (1) A deeper investigation into the novel principle of fold-change detection we discovered in the Wnt pathway; (2) Investigation into the properties that facilitate tissue-specificity of the pathway; and (3) Investigation into the implementation of the Wnt pathway in patterning the embryos.

Click on the topic to read more.
Do cells sense absolute or relative level of signal?
One pathway, many functions.
How to be a part of the whole?

Relevant publications

Contact: goentoro@caltech.edu