The O'Brien Lab studies the behaviors of stem cells and their mature progeny to understand how organs remodel and renew
Our organs are
dynamic cellular collectives
Our organs contain multitudes of cells—mature cells that execute organ function, stem cells that generate new cells, immature cells that are differentiating, and spent cells that will soon be lost.
We study the demographics and dynamics of these populations––their sizes, compositions, and spatial distributions over time.
Profound lessons
from the simple fly gut
Our model is a simple digestive organ, the midgut of the adult fruit fly. By combining novel live imaging and computational approaches with sophisticated genetics, we discover how single-cell behaviors collectively produce diverse tissue-level outcomes to adapt organ form continually across an animal’s lifetime.
“...because all the mysteries of the universe are contained in the gut of a fly. ”
