Research Interests

Cell Fate Specification: The Rebay Lab has a long-standing interest in understanding how cell fates are specified accurately and reproducibly during development. To approach this problem we investigate the mechanisms by which repressive and activating transcriptional inputs are integrated before, during and after inductive signaling to produce the gene expression dynamics that drive developmental transitions. Two evolutionarily conserved gene regulatory networks provide the primary vantage point for these efforts. The first is a Receptor Tyrosine Kinase effector switch centered around two conserved ETS family transcription factors, a repressor Yan and an activator Pointed, that contributes to cell fate transitions in many different developmental contexts including the heart and the eye. The second is the Retinal Determination Network whose coordinated transcriptional action not only specifies the initial eye field but also orchestrates proliferative and differentiative cellular transitions throughout the entire subsequent developmental program. Using a multi-disciplinary experimental approach that spans molecular genetics, quantitative cell biology, genomics, biochemistry and mathematical modeling, we are exploring the intricate meshwork of transcriptional, post-transcriptional and post-translational interactions that influence and integrate the activity and output of these signaling networks during retinal and cardiac cell fate specification.