Studying the impact of environmental change on early morphogenesis - Manon Valet (TU Dresden, Germany)

How does embryonic development remain robust to environmental variations? Many organisms are external developers, which means that their eggs are developing outside of the parent from the onset of fertilization. During the first divisions up to the moment where they hatch, embryos are exposed to variations in temperature, pH, external light, etc…. Among those external sources of variation, temperature is known to impact developmental speed: embryos hatch earlier when temperature is higher. To investigate this phenomenon, I combine live imaging at different spatial scales with mechanical perturbations to characterize the effect of environmental temperature variations on the embryogenesis of zebrafish.

More specifically, to explore how temperature affects morphogenetic fields and developmental speed, I first measure how cellular flows are affected by a change in temperature. I then investigate how those dynamical changes can be linked to material properties and sub-cellular processes, using a custom-built temperature-controlled stage. I will discuss the potentials of multi-scale physics to characterize the phenotype of multi-cellular organisms and their robustness to environmental perturbations.

Contact: Karin John