IMAGINE living in a house with 10 rooms, but 9 of them are closed: you do not even know what's in there! Shouldn’t one do everything possible to find the keys to open these unexplored rooms? Of course one should, as the place where we live largely defines the quality of our lives.
One might think that no one lives this situation. Yet, in a sense, we all do. Our genome, even more than our home, defines who we are: it determines our appearance, our cognition, what we like, how we perceive experiences, the disease to which we are susceptible and possibly how to prevent or cure them. Yet, science so far only understood the function of less than 10% of the genome's content. In other words, 9 out of its 10 doors are closed! Shouldn’t we do all in our power to find the keys for these immensely important, hidden spaces of biological information? I believe that we should, and my research is an attempted leap forward this direction.
RATIONALE: At the moment of our conception we were a single cell. At birth, after a few months of embryonic development, we possess a complex body composed of many trillion cells (a number that looks like this 10,000,000,000,000) each of one is highly specialized to a key duty: transmitting electrical impulses (neurons in the brain), contracting to move body parts, walk and interact with the environment (muscle cells), transporting oxygen (red blood cells), and many others. All the cells within a single organism, with very rare exceptions, possess the same genetic material.
QUESTION: How could a single “instruction manual” – The Genome – impose different identities to each cell?
Understanding this is important: first, because embryonic development and cell differentiation are such spectacularly cool phenomena. Second, several human pathological conditions arise when genomic mechanisms are perturbed.
