First association that came to me was with the anatomical theatre at Padova University where I did my undergrad and PhD: it’s the first stable anatomical theatre in the world used to teach human anatomy. To me symbolizes the longing for knowledge and for teaching. Looking forward to read the book!

Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park. Kings Canyon National Park (solo backpacking)

Intriguingly, when we looked at later stages, it seems like these synthetic organizers continue to provide instructing signal, and support more complex patterning and morphogenetic movement, elongating in a cord-like fashion towards the organizer (red in the figure).

in fig. 3 we show how the signals emanating from these tunable organizers are induce initial patterning and morphogenetic responses in the developing nephrons in the organoids. This is now interesting: synthetic cluster of cells can pattern developing organoids. But is is transient?

The real question was, in fact, will it induce patterning and or morphogenesis in the organoid nephrons? To do so, we first generated inducible organizers, where the level of Wnt ligand can be tuned with a small molecule.

So in kidney organoids, as shown in Fig.2, nephron progenitors emerge without collecting ducts: and without them, there is no organizer activity and no further patterning and morphogenesis is possible.

from the analysis in Fig 1 it was evident that there is an organizing activity emanating from the collecting duct region of the developing kidney that instruct the nephrons both in terms of patterning (different cell types at different distance), morphogenesis (elongation towards the organizer).

During kidney development, there is a structure that was hypothesized to secrete “organizing” molecules, but has not been deemed an organizer yet. We looked more into it with a tour de force in spatial transcriptomics from human developing kidney