Principal investigator
Emma R. Andersson
Developmental signalling and organ formation in health and disease.
Andersson studies the developmental principles that decide how organs acquire their structure, and much of the group's distinctiveness comes from the tools it built to ask those questions in a living embryo.
She pioneered ultrasound-guided in utero nano-injection, which allows gene expression to be manipulated in a specific organ at a specific moment in development. Applied at scale, it enabled high-throughput embryonic lineage tracing and whole-nervous-system single-cell lineage mapping (Science 2025), and ectoderm barcoding revealing neural and cochlear compartmentalisation.
A second strand concerns Notch signalling and Alagille syndrome, a Notch disorder that disrupts the coordinated development of the liver and vasculature. The group's Jag1 work spans liver fibrosis and hepatocyte maturation, cell fate in the cochlea, and improved diagnostics for variants of uncertain significance.
The lab has also developed miRNA–mRNA regulatory tools for mapping and perturbing microRNA target pairing, and works with an explicit emphasis on replacing, reducing and refining animal use. She received the EASL Daniel Alagille Award.