DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT

I. Systematic phenotypic analysis of C. elegans lineage differentiation over time, space and genome... RNAi screening of 1,061 embryonic essential genes identified 204 developmental regulatory genes with broad molecular and cellular functions... The Bao Lab at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is interested in developmental systems biology. In particular, we use C. elegans embryogenesis as a model to develop technologies for live imaging, automated cell tracking, and systematic single-cell analysis. We use these techniques to understand how complex tissues arise from networks of interacting genes and cells. From our efforts we have produced Starrynite, one of the leading software packages for automated cell tracking in 3D tissues. Besides the worm, Starrynite shows comparable accuracy, speed and robustness in other model organisms such as Drosophila, zebrafish and mouse.