The molecular basis of thyroid and lung development

内胚层是一个描述早期胚胎内层的术语。这一层将生成一个简单的管

Endoderm is a term that describes the interior layer of an early embryo. This layer will generate a simple tube that will give rise to many important organs including the thyroid, lung, pancreas, liver, and stomach. These organs arise from specific points along the tube in a precise spatial order. The thyroid comes from the very front of the tube and the lung comes from endoderm located further back. At the earliest stages of development, these two regions share many genes that are essential for their eventual development and so we wish to discover what makes the two organs different. We have found that addition of retinoic acid, the active form of vitamin A, causes the thyroid to turn off several important thyroid genes and turn on genes that are normally only expressed in lung. Our goal is to understand this switch in developmental fate. We will also exploit this switch to search for new genes that important for making a thyroid or a lung. Once we have obtained genes that are expressed in one organ or the other, we will manipulate those genes to examine their effect on thyroid and lung differentiation. By doing so we hope to gain a better understanding of the molecular network needed for the normal development of these endodermal organs.