US-Finland Cooperative Research on the Molecular Basis of Embryonic Induction

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This award provides partial support for a long term >(sabbatical) research visit by Professor Scott F. Gilbert of Swarthmore College to the laboratory of Professor Lauri Saxen of the Department of Pathology of the University of Helsinki, Finland. They are interested in understanding the early events of morphogenesis, and are attempting to establish which genes are being activated by the inducer. Their approach is to construct cDNA libraries from uninduced and from newly induced mesenchymal tissue in mouse kidney. By comparing those mRNA's from induced and uninduced mesenchyme, they will be able to determine which genes are activated by the inducer and establish a temporal and spatial sequence of kidney induction. This is emerging as a powerful and ultasensitive techniques for identifying early transcriptive events. The collaboration brings together Dr. Saxen's world class expertise in embryonic kidney induction, differentiation and morphogenesis with the experience and interest of Dr. Gilbert in molecular biological methods for studying induction and tissue competence. One of the greatest challenges of developmental biology concerns how the nuclear genome instructs the morphogenesis of complex organs containing intricately coordinated arrangements of tissues. Central to this issue is how cells respond to inductive influences from neighboring cells during organogenesis. The induction of the mammalian kidney has become a model for such organogenesis where reciprocal interactions between two tissues create the rudiments of an organ. The proposed collaborative effort will contribute to our understanding of the molecular basis of morphogenesis.