The accessible chromatin landscape of cardiac progenitors: characterizing regulatory elements on a genome-wide scale

The harnessing of multipotent cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) offers massive potential in the development of new therapeutic strategies and approaches for the treatment of cardiovascular conditions.

To realize this promising goal, it is vital for us to obtain the ‘big-picture’ of molecular mechanisms that govern the fundamental cellular processes in developing embryos, including cell fate specification and cell movements.

To date, work has focused on a limited number of signalling pathways and key transcription factors and our understanding of how these become integrated into gene regulatory networks is incomplete.

This new project will investigate the regulatory mechanisms during CPC migration and early stages of cell fate acquisition on a genome-wide scale using advanced next generation sequencing technologies and the early chick embryo, an established and accessible model for rapid functional analysis of novels genes and regulatory elements.

We will examine the dynamics of the changing regulatory landscape using a set of time-points along the spatio-temporal corridor of CPC migration and fate commitment.