Mammalian development is a highly orchestrated process where millions of cells move in concert to ensure the formation of diverse tissues and organs. In particular, during gastrulation and early organogenesis, a relatively homogenous group of pluripotent cells rapidly diversify to shape complex morphological domains with specialized functions. These intricate processes require multiple regulative layers that dynamically crosstalk to guarantee developmental robustness, including the interactions between genes, cells, and the extracellular environment. Despite foundational work in the past century, quantitative measurements of these dynamic interactions remain challenging, mainly because of the embryo inaccessibility in the maternal womb and the lack of adequate tools to decode its complexity. I will present novel stem cell-based and genomic approaches that we developed to make mammalian embryogenesis more accessible and tunable, including enhanced in vitro models, 3D spatial transcriptomic maps, and single-cell genetic lineage tracing technologies. This innovative toolkit allowed us to assess the role of the extracellular matrix in tissue morphogenesis, study the spatial organization of gene expression in mutant embryos, and chart complex developmental trajectories during critical windows of mammalian development.

Adriano Bolondi studied Biology and Biotechnology at "Sapienza University" in Rome, where he earned his Bachelor's (2014) and Master's (2016) with honors investigating the role of chromatin regulators during aging. After spending some time at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School with Prof. George Daley as an Armenise-Harvard undergraduate Fellow studying the role of chromatin proteins in human HSCs development, Adriano moved to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin to start his PhD. He joined the newly established Lab of Prof. Alexander Meissner in 2017, where he developed stem cell-based technologies to investigate the mouse embryo at unprecedented resolution. He earned his PhD with honors in 2022, and since then, he is developing new genomic approaches to describe mammalian development from a statistical and quantitative angle.