Dr Peter Lawrence FRS

José Casal and I try to understand animal design and pattern formation. An important and rather neglected aspect of development of both animals and plants is vectorial  — how do cells know which way to move, how to polarise cell divisions, how to orient cell extensions such as axons, hairs or bristles? We are using Drosophila and studying what must be at least part of this vectorial information and is known as planar cell polarity (PCP). We have found that PCP depends on (at least) two genetic systems (the Dachsous/Fat system and the Starry night (Flamingo)/Frizzled system and are trying to understand these systems better, both at the cellular and the molecular level. Our approaches include genetic mosaics, genetic engineering as well as observations (confocal microscopy) and experiments on the epidermal cells of living larvae.