ANALYSIS OF THE CELLULAR BEHAVIOR OF NEUROMESODERMAL PROGENITORS

Neuromesodermal progenitors (NMPs) represent a population of stem cells located in the vertebrate embryonic tail. These stem cells are crucial for building both nervous and musculoskeletal systems. Interestingly, NMPs can be derived and differentiated from human pluripotent stem cells, making them a great hope for tissue engineering. However, we still do not know how these stem cells are coordinating their differentiation programs with the morphogenetic events leading to mesodermal and neural tissue organization. We recently showed that NMPs display unexpectedly high levels of cell-to-cell heterogeneity, a property that we found to be related to their capacity to auto-organize in tissues. We will use bird embryo as a model system, combining state-of-the-art primary culture, single-cell RNA seq, live imaging, and functional studies by electroporation we aim to understand the cellular behavior involved in progenitor segregation and tissue production.