👤 Estefanía Romaniuk

Embryonic stem cells can be instructed to form gastruloids, an efficient four-dimensional model for studying some aspects of post-implantation embryonic patterning, which undergo gastrulation-like processes, illustrating their robust self-organizing capacity to form embryo-like patterns. Here, we study the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying this remarkable property and report that self-organization competence is associated with a cell-specific coordination of a cadherin switch. E-cadherin repression by Snai1 is indeed critical for this process, with Snai1 triggering the cell-specific pace of pluripotency exit, thus allowing a coordinated transition from E- to N-cadherin to occur. In contrast, we find that N-cadherin inactivation unleashes gastruloids' morphogenetic competence, for it leads to the formation of embryo-like structures with proper rostro-caudal somite patterning without requiring any addition of extracellular matrix. Altogether, this work establishes a molecular mechanism that integrates the exit from pluripotency and the pace of cell differentiation, leading to the self-organizing potential of gastruloids. Show less

Temperament can be defined as the emotional variability among animals of the same species in response to the same stimulus, grouping animals by their reactivity as nervous, intermediate, or calm. Our goal was to identify genomic regions with the temperament phenotype measured by the Isolation Box Test (IBT) by single-step genome-wide association studies (ssGWAS). The database consisted of 4317 animals with temperament records, and 1697 genotyped animals with 38,268 effective Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) after quality control. We identified three genomic regions that explained the greatest percentage of the genetic variance, resulting in 25 SNP associated with candidate genes on chromosomes 6, 10, and 21. A total of nine candidate genes are reported for the temperament trait, which is: Show less