Rafael Carazo Salas

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.