Embryonic development of multicellular organisms need to yield consistent developmental outcomes in the context of a variable environment. Therefore, patterns of gene expression are tightly regulated. However, environmental parameters, such as temperature, affect many molecular mechanisms, including gene expression. Deviations from the optimal developmental temperature can be buffered in a certain permissive range, but will become detrimental outside of this range. As the effect of thermal stress is often cell type-specific, investigations of the effects of such environmental perturbations need to be performed at a scale and resolution matching this non-uniform response. In my work, we leverage a Norwegian population of the sea squirt Ciona intestinalis  and the power of single-cell RNA-seq to investigate developmental thermal effects at the single-cell level.

J. Brandenburg, A. Trinks, D. Voijtasova, A. Monaco, W. Chang, R. Arsie, M. Hu, A. Hamdoun, C. Jenniches, M. Landthaler, N. Blüthgen, and D. Garfield. The Establishment of Cell-Type Specific Gene Regulation in the Sea Urchin Embryo. 2025. BioRxiv 2025.08.12.669999. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.12.669999

Y. Bernadskaya, A. Kuan, A. Tjärnberg, J. Brandenburg, P. Zhang, K. Wiechecki, N. Kaplan, M. Failla, M. Bikou, O. Madilian, N. Bruderer, W. Wang, and L. Christiaen. Cell cycle-driven transcriptome maturation confers multilineage competence to cardiopharyngeal progenitors. 2025. The EMBO Journal. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44318-025-00613-y

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