Sarah Bowling, Ph.D.

Research

My research group will investigate how mammalian embryos maintain resilience in the face of injury or cell loss. During development, a single cell divides to form every type of tissue in the body. Even more remarkably, embryos can adapt to significant damage and still produce healthy offspring: They can continue to develop even after losing more than half of their cells. But the cellular and molecular mechanisms that facilitate this developmental flexibility remain a mystery. As a postdoctoral fellow, I developed an approach to tracking cells and their progeny through cell “barcoding” in a developing mouse embryo. Now, combining this method with a suite of cutting-edge tools in embryology and cell and molecular genetics, our group will pinpoint how embryos develop to form diverse cell types in both healthy and perturbed conditions. Our findings could be harnessed to better understand the cause of birth defects, or to develop treatments that improve tissue repair in adulthood.