R&D:
How the fertilized egg orchestrates the formation of multicellular organs and an entire organism, while establishing the germ cell lineage to ensure the continuity of life, is a central question in developmental biology. Our research direction converges on unraveling the fundamental mechanisms by which early embryos invoke such a high developmental genome plasticity. To this end, we dissect the dynamics of epigenetic remodeling and transcriptional network activation, as well as the functional roles of non-coding genetic reservoirs, including transposable elements. In parallel, we explore the evolutionary diversity of developmental programs through cross-species comparative analyses.