Researcher's Profile

Starting from a fertilized egg, cells proliferate, pass their genomic information to their offspring, and dynamically change their functions to form diverse tissue structures. Throughout development, intracellular and environmental cues trigger patterns of gene expression that govern cell state transitions and produce additional cellular and environmental cues, leading cells to self-organize into functional clusters within spatially distinct areas. How can these processes be investigated? High-resolution molecular snapshots of cells can be obtained using various omics technologies, but these methods require the destruction of the sample, thereby precluding time-course analyses. Live-cell imaging with fluorescent probes can analyze time-course dynamics but this method is limited to analyzing only a small number of molecules or cells. To overcome this common obstacle in biology, our research lab is pioneering two major fileds in biology: DNA event recording and retrospective clone isolation.