Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Adult tissues such as blood, intestine and brain contain pools of resident stem cells. These stem cells are essential for tissue maintenance and they also play an important role in recovery after an injury. Because it is easy to access and manipulate, the mouse skin hair follicle and its population of stem cells is an excellent model of adult tissue regeneration. Our lab has developed a technique to watch the behaviour of hair follicle stem cells over long periods of time in living mice. We have been able to observe the different cell behaviours that occur in the follicle during regeneration, but we still don't know how these behaviours are controlled by signals from the surrounding environment. To address this question, I will develop a new technique to manipulate different signaling pathways in the hair follicle using light-induced gene deletion. I will optimize this technique using a fluorescent reporter that will tell me how much light exposure is required to cause deletion. Once optimized, this technique will allow me to alter cell signaling with a much higher spatial and temporal resolution that previously possible. I will then use light-induced gene deletion to alter signaling pathways thought to be important for regeneration within very small groups of cells in the hair follicle, and then observe how behaviours such as division, migration, and differentiation are affected in these cells during regeneration. This work will determine how conserved signaling pathways are integrated within stem cells to control the process of tissue regeneration.