20 October 2023
Marcos Simoes-Costa
Department of Systems Biology
Harvard Medical School
Embryonic development is characterized by the emergence of intricate arrangements of cells that give rise to tissues and organs. This process relies on the interpretation of spatial cues that are sensed, recorded, and integrated by developing cells. A central aim for developmental biologists is to decipher how the linear genome generates a high degree of tridimensional complexity. Here, I will discuss the regulatory features that allow the genome to interpret spatial information. These features include (i) the cis-regulatory mechanisms that enable the sensing of positional data; (ii) the structure of the genome as a sparse matrix of regulatory modules; and (iii) the dynamic nature of chromatin conformation. These attributes demonstrate that the genome, beyond its traditional definition as a one-dimensional sequence of genes, is itself a processor of spatial information during embryonic development.