Kenji Sugioka

Our life starts from a single-cell, fertilized egg, that divides to produce 37.2 trillion cells consisting of our body. In the course of cell proliferation, timing and angle of cell division need to be orchestrated to shape tissues and organs. Although failures in the spatial-temporal cell division regulation are associated with various diseases such as cancer, microcephaly, and leukemia, our knowledge of the mechanism of cell division control is limited. Especially, how individual cell interprets environmental information and specifies cell division dynamics (cell cycle phase to specify division timing and force generation by motor proteins to specify division angle) are largely unknown in multicellular systems due to their complexity.

To tackle the question described above, our lab studies multicellular division mechanisms using simple multicellular model C. elegans embryos. C. elegans has only 959 somatic cells yet is complex enough to develop different tissues and organs. Remarkably, they have invariant cell division dynamics among individuals, thereby allowing quantitative and single-cell level analysis of multicellular division. By taking advantage of its genetic and physical manipulatability, we will perform live-imaging, quantitative analysis, genetics, and in vitro reconstitution of simplified multicellular tissues, to investigate mechanisms that are critical to understand the regulations of multicellular division. We will also extend our research to investigate mouse embryos to confirm our findings made in nematode and explore unified mechanisms that rule animal cell division

1. Causal relationships between environmental cue and cell division outcomes

2. Molecular and physical mechanisms underlying the context-dependent control of cell division

3. Cell division coordination mechanism that orchestrates embryogenesis/organogenesis