Professor Jamie Davies
The self-organizing kidney
12th December, 1pm
June Lloyd Room (PUW4), ICH
ABSTRACT
The large scale features of animal development (1 head, 4 limbs...) are fixed and
predictable, but small-scale features (capillary patterns, layout of alveoli etc) are predictable
only in a statistical sense. Small scale features may not be specified directly by a 'genetic
program' but be self-organizing. According to this view, genes make molecular machines
that interact with their immediate environments and organize micro-patterns in an
appropriate way. In principle, this adaptive self-organization has a number of very useful
features including scaleability and error mitigation. This talk will briefly examine the
evidence for mechanisms of adaptive self-organization during mammalian kidney
development, and discuss the how this might be used in tissue engineering. The point will
be illustrated by the engineering of anatomically realistic and physiologically active mouse
'foetal kidneys' from simple suspensions of renogenic stem cells.
BIOSKETCH
Jamie Davies is Professor of Experimental Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. His main
research interest is the creation of biological form, particularly how the simple creates the
complex. His lab approaches this in three ways: basic developmental biology (particularly
self-organization in organogenesis), tissue engineering to make organs in vitro, and
synthetic biology to drive programmed morphogenesis. Preferring interdisciplinary
approaches, he is a Fellow of the Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Royal
Society of Arts, and a member of the IEEE. He has recently published Life Unfolding – how
the human body builds itself (OUP).