We study how animal tissues acquire and maintain their shape, and what happens when that shape gets disrupted.
The Finegan-Bergstralh Lab is a multi-disciplinary research group based in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO, USA.
We aim to answer both basic and biomedically relevant scientific questions about
how epithelial tissues are formed and maintained in animal bodies.
Lab photo, Fall 2024
Lab photo, Summer 2024
An intestinal organoid “mini-gut” imaged with a fluorescence confocal microscope. These multi-cellular structures grow from single stem cells and form a structure that recapitulates that of the mature animal gut.
We study how animal tissues are built during development, and how they are maintained during their lifetime. Our central research questions are:
1) How do cells orient their divisions such that daughter cells are born in the correct position?
2) How are cells misplaced following cell division incorporated back into their parental tissue?
Our lab approaches these questions using trans-disciplinary tools and our research team have diverse backgrounds.