A fertilized egg develops into all kinds of cell types, for instance fat cells, bone cells, muscle cells, reproductive cells, blood cells and nerve cells.
A fertilized egg develops into all kinds of cell types, for instance fat cells, bone cells, muscle cells, reproductive cells, blood cells and nerve cells. Every human body starts out as one single cell: a fertilized egg. This cell develops into all kinds of cell types: skin cells, liver cells, blood cells. Although these cell types look and function differently, they all contain exactly the same DNA. Tuncay Baubec and his research group try to understand how the same genetic code is used to build the more than 200 different cell types in our body. By zooming in on mechanisms that chemically modify DNA without changing the actual DNA sequence, they want to figure out how genes are turned 'on' and 'off' at the right time during development. Besides leading to fundamental insights into these mechanisms, results of this research might also have implications for cancer therapy.
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