Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
the face is the most profound part of
our bodies in terms of identifying us as
who we are and in communicating how
we're feeling the face is our portal to
the world so when you look at somebody
their facial expression their non-verbal
cues give you a lot of information and
so it's really critical to have a
functioning face to interact with the
world how you get that enormously
complicated personal structure how it's
put together together you know that is
the driver we learn almost everything
about human development by not studying
humans we study
frogs the same tissue types that you
find in a frog face are also found in
human face and the lessons we learn in
the Frog embryo we can apply to
humans so our lab looks at a part of the
face which becomes the mouth the region
becomes progressively thinner and
thinner so that you just get a single
layer of cells and then we think that
single layer of cells which covers up
where the mouth is going to open gets
pulled and it breaks which is the
mouth and making a hole in an animal is
a very serious business because if it's
an uncontrolled hole you know the animal
has an injury so the hole of the mouth
has to be very carefully connected up to
the digestive system but we also
discovered something very surprising
before the mouth actually forms this
part of the embryo the extreme anterior
domain what it does is send out chemical
signals that guide the formation of the
rest of the face that guide the other
cells called neuroc crest cells that are
going to build the face and those neuroc
crest cells had to migrate into your
face first and then form all these
different tissue types that would become
the full FL Ed face so actually most of
your face didn't start off in your face
it started off at the top or you know
behind your head a little bit before
neuroc crest cells are in the in the
face the face is just a blank slate of
tissue and when the neuros cells migrate
and populate the blank slate they
actually form the 3D topography of your
face it's like a huge
Festival it's like an Ikea catalog there
all these instructions that are being
followed and you keep building things
that are more and more complicated but
over time you know this Festival of Ikea
building turns into this embryo with all
its different parts and without the
extreme interior domain the neuroc cells
would be stuck up here it wouldn't be
able to fully form um your face in your
mouth part of our work is to try to
understand how face formation goes wrong
and to know enough to contribute to try
to correct it cranial facial defects
such as cleft pallet make up about 1/3
of all birth defects although it's
pretty common the reason why these
defects occur is not yet known and so we
hypothesize that the extreme interior
domain could be a factor so if we could
have a more detailed understanding of
how the extreme interior domain uh
signals we could maybe even diagnose
cranofacial defects and be able to
repair those defects in
utero every organism I look at that's
put together so beautifully and so
perfectly I think it's just a
extraordinary in my heart the word is
magical and I think having the
opportunity to understand you know the
molecules behind the magic um is a real
privilege and that's what really drives
our research