Integrative cell biology of pluripotency and differentiation

Research Interests

Research in our group seeks to elucidate how the gene and protein networks that control basic or disease-related processes like cellular growth, division and differentiation operate in space and in time within cells, and how those networks allow cells to function as integrated systems. We develop and use a range of interdisciplinary quantitative cell biology methods, including 3D high-throughput/high-content microscopy pipelines and Big Data approaches.

In the past few years, we successfully used this strategy with yeast to systematically discover hundreds of novel genes and pathways controlling and linking diverse biological functions, like cell shape control, cytoskeletal organization, cell cycle progression and cell polarity.

More recently, we have been actively pioneering a similar mindset and technologies to investigate how pluripotency and differentiation decisions are controlled both at the cell biological level and at the single-cell level, using human Embryonic Stem (ES) cells and induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells as experimental paradigms. Our goal is to understand how to specifically, efficiently and safely "programme" heterogeneous populations of stem cells for therapeutic applications.

Selected publications

• Activation of polarized cell growth by inhibition of cell polarity. Geymonat M, Chessel A, Dodgson J, Punter H, Horns F, Csikász Nagy A, Carazo Salas RE#. BioRxiv 2018 Aug. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/402990.

• Osokin A, Chessel A, Carazo Salas RE, Vaggi F. GANs for Biological Image Synthesis. arXiv 2017 and ICCV 2017. arXiv:1708.04692.

• Williams E, Moore J, Li S, Rustici G, Tarkowska A, Chessel A, Leo S, Antal B, Ferguson RK, Sarkans U, Brazma A, Carazo Salas RE, Swedlow JR. The Image Data Resource: A Scalable Platform for Biological Image Data Access, Integration, and Dissemination. Nature Methods 2017 and BioRxiv 2016.

• Del Sol A, Thiesen HJ, Imitola J, Carazo Salas RE. Big-Data-Driven Stem Cell Science and Tissue Engineering: Vision and Unique Opportunities. Cell Stem Cell. 2017 Feb 2;20(2):157-160.

• Dodgson J, Chessel A, Vaggi F, Giordan M, Yamamoto M, Arai K, Madrid M, Geymonat M, Abenza JF, Cansado J, Sato M, Csikasz-Nagy A, Carazo Salas RE. Reconstructing regulatory pathways by systematically mapping protein localization interdependency networks. BioRxiv. 2017 Mar.

• Antal B, Chessel A, Carazo Salas RE. Mineotaur: a tool for high-content microscopy screen sharing and visual analytics. Genome Biology. 2015 Dec 17;16(1):283.

• Abenza JF, Couturier E, Dodgson J, Dickmann J, Chessel A, Dumais J, Carazo Salas RE. Wall mechanics and exocytosis define the shape of growth domains in fission yeast. Nature Communications. 2015 Oct 12;6:8400.

• Jeffares DC, Rallis C, Rieux A, Speed D, Převorovský M, Mourier T, Marsellach FX, Iqbal Z, Lau W, Cheng TM, Pracana R, Mülleder M, Lawson JL, Chessel A, Bala S, Hellenthal G, O'Fallon B, Keane T, Simpson JT, Bischof L, Tomiczek B, Bitton DA, Sideri T, Codlin S, Hellberg JE, van Trigt L, Jeffery L, Li JJ, Atkinson S, Thodberg M, Febrer M, McLay K, Drou N, Brown W, Hayles J, Carazo Salas RE, Ralser M, Maniatis N, Balding DJ, Balloux F, Durbin R, Bähler J. The genomic and phenotypic diversity of Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Nature Genetics. 2015 Mar;47(3):235-41.

• Graml V, Studera X, Lawson JL, Chessel A, Geymonat M, Bortfeld-Miller M, Walter T, Wagstaff L, Piddini E, Carazo Salas RE. A genomic Multiprocess survey of the machineries that control and link cell shape, microtubule organisation and cell-cycle progression. Developmental Cell. 2014 Oct 27;31(2):227-39.

• Vaggi F, Schiavinotto T, Lawson JL, Chessel A, Dodgson J, Geymonat M, Sato M, Carazo Salas RE, Csikász-Nagy A. A network approach to mixing delegates at meetings. eLife. 2014;3:e02273.

>> Full list of publications on PubMed

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A postdoc position in human stem cell biology is currently available in the Carazo Salas group