Research

One of the great innovations in the natural history of life on earth was the advent of the eukaryotic cell. Far from being a random soup of chemicals, the eukaryotic cell is a highly structured object that self-organizes into compartments known as organelles. Organelles provide specialized environments that house biochemical processes crucial to life, from gene transcription in the nucleus to ATP production in the mitochondria. At the same time, organelles consume matter and energy in order to be built by the cell. By what principles does the cell allocate resources to its organelles and control their synthesis? How does the organelle composition of the cell dictate its physiological capabilities? In our group, we aim to answer these questions at the heart of quantitative cell biology through a combination of theory and experiment.