Mechanobiology of vertebrate gut morphogenesis

• ABSTRACT:

• The embryo undergoes profound yet precisely organized physical transformations during development. This requires the coordination of genetic and molecular cues with cell behaviors that ultimately regulate the mechanical process of shaping tissues and organs. This seminar will describe our efforts to study the integration between mechanical and biological aspects of intestinal development, focusing on a mechanical instability that bends the embryonic intestine into compact loops. This process is essential for the orderly packing of the intestine within the body, and errors in this process result in severe, poorly understood birth defects. We will briefly consider mechanical feedback in this system, and broadly, how evolution acts upon tissue mechanics to enact morphological diversity across species.

   

  BIOGRAPHY:

  Nandan Nerurkar received a BS in Bioengineering from the University of Maryland College Park in 2003, an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 under the mentorship of Prof. Dawn Elliott. Nandan completed his training as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School before joining Columbia as an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering in January 2018. His lab investigates draws from mechanics and embryology to study how vertebrate embryos build organs during development.