Engineered developmental signals could illuminate regenerative medicine
Source: Phys.org
One of the ways cells in developing organisms keep track of where they are and what they are supposed to be doing is through a type of chemical signal called a morphogen. Lim's synthetic biology team at UCSF and a pair of research groups at the Francis Crick Institute in London—led by Guillaume Salbreux, Ph.D., and Jean-Paul Vincent, Ph.D. independently took the innovative approach of engineering a synthetic morphogen from the ground up.