Dynamic and spatiotemporal control of cell to cell signalling for building precise multicellular structures
One aim of our group is to achieve high spatiotemporal control over cell-cell and cell-material interactions in a non-invasive, reversible manner by using visible light. This will enable us to address questions in cell biology. In this context I engineered a light responsive version of the Notch signalling pathway (OptoNotch), which allows us to drive user-defined functional responses in cells. Going forward we want to investigate the temporal activation profile by measuring the fluorescence of a reporter gene to quantitatively establish the relationship between Notch signalling activation, contact size and cell contact dependent geometry.