Dr Alberto Roselló-Díez’s main question is why the whole is more than the sum of the parts. In other words, how do cells integrate external and internal information to make decisions that lead to complex outcomes, such as organogenesis. He has studied vertebrate development, mainly focused on the limbs, to address this question. Alberto received his PhD in molecular biology from Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) for his work in the group of Dr. Miguel Torres, where he studied early limb development in chicken and mouse.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the Joyner laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New york, USA), Alberto developed mouse genetic models of unilateral insults, to study regulation of limb growth. These models led to the discovery that local and systemic mechanisms interact during the response to developmental insults, giving rise to a new holistic view of organ repair, where multiple tissues interact.

In 2017 he was appointed Junior Group Leader at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His current work is centred on understanding the short- and long-range communication mechanisms that regulate growth within and between organs, during vertebrate limb development and regeneration. The laboratory started operating late May 2018, addressing two main topics:

1-   Local compensatory mechanisms that cope with perturbations in growing bones

2-   Inter-organ communication mechanisms that maintain body proportions when individual organs are damaged during development

In the long term, the goal of the lab is to learn how to re-activate or boost the responses uncovered by these studies. This will lead to new regenerative medicine approaches for disorders such as achondroplasia or foetal growth restriction.

Regulation of organ size

Catch-up growth

Bone growth

Inter-organ communication

Regenerative medicine

Accepting students