Project 3: How does regeneration differ from development?

The goal of the project is to explore whether (and to what extent) regeneration mirrors development. Our team has recently established transgenic, live imaging, and genomics approaches to study leg regeneration in the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis (see tinyurl.com/4vfbspp8). Parhyale can regenerate their legs throughout their lifetime. The regenerated legs are faithful replicas of the original legs generated during development (tinyurl.com/ycktdn2z), but the transcriptional and cellular dynamics associated with leg development and regeneration are significantly different (tinyurl.com/mr28u57m and unpublished). These observations suggest that identical structures could be generated by distinct mechanisms.

The recruited fellow will have the opportunity to probe this question using molecular genetics, imaging and genomics resources established in our team. Different projects can be envisaged in this context, depending on the candidate’s skills and interests, including:

1. Reconstructing putative gene regulatory networks (GRNs) operating during leg development and regeneration based on bioinformatic analyses of single-cell RNAseq and chromatin profiling data, validating selected nodes, and comparing their roles in development and regeneration with in vivo experiments.
2. Discovering to what extent the same genetic instructions are used to generate a leg during embryonic development and regeneration, by identifying the cis-regulatory elements of key patterning genes and comparing their activity during development and regeneration in transgenic animals
3. Identifying the progenitors of different cell types during regeneration, based on the reconstruction of cell trajectories using snRNseq data, the establishment of Brainbow-like labeling tools, live microscopy and cell tracking.