Cell and Developmental Biology

The Cell and Developmental Biology Department is focused on learning more about the stages of a cell’s development. Many of the questions the scientists in this department seek to answer revolve around decisions that occur at the very beginning of a cell or an organism’s life. For instance, when one set of instructions is turned on compared to another set of instructions, you can get a wildly different type of grown-up cell. This process is about how a human embryo – following cellular and developmental instructions - can grow into a fully functioning human with heart cells and skin cells and brain cells all performing different jobs. However, things can go awry at various stages of development, so it’s important to understand when and where the right instructions need to be turned on in every cell. Knowing how development works to make a fully functioning human allows scientists to understand how to fix the instructions if something were to go wrong.