On 23rd April, Sars-Fang centre hold its fourth Internal Seminar. The speaker is new PI Wei WANG and the topic is A Transcriptional Roadmap Towards A Beating Heart and Beyond.

Prof. Wei Wang's lab seeks the answers to one of the essential questions in embryo development: How the diversity of cells in functional organs emerges from multipotent progenitors? More specifically, we use a simple marine chordate - Ciona Robusta to acquire a system-level understanding of cardiogenesis from the First and Second heart precursors.  we embrace the most up-to-date advances of single-cell technology and data analysis toolkits to obtain a global view of transcriptional dynamics during cardiogenesis. Combined with the traditional advantages of Ciona as a model animal, like rapid growth, optical transparency, and amenability to molecular perturbations, our research would lead to a system-level interpretation of how the diversity of cell types in a functional heart arising from the multipotent progenitors. We would also explore beyond the cardiopharyngeal lineage into the unknown of organogenesis using this fascinating in vivo system.

Following Prof. Wei Wang's previous studies, the research at Sars-Fang Center, Ocean University of China, will currently focus on revealing:

1) The heterogeneity of the cardiac progenitors in the first and second heart fields and the underlying regulatory mechanisms.

2)  How the divergence in the cardiac progenitor field is reflected in the functional juvenile heart?

3) How the dynamics of gene expression and chromatin architecture regulate the cell fate commitment in the heart precursors?