Heiko Lickert

This study shows that MAFA promotes pancreatic islet maturation by enhancing cell growth, metabolic function, and stress resilience in stem cell-derived islets.

This paper introduces a dual-gastruloid model to study the co-development of foregut-pharyngeal mesoderm in mice, showing the role of Foxa2 in Tbx1 expression.

TERRA is a foundation model for spatial transcriptomics that predicts tissue behavior under perturbation and identifies multi-scale biological insights across tissues.

The paper investigates human α and β cell fate allocation in stem cell-derived islets, revealing a distinct regulatory mechanism compared to mice and identifying pharmacological strategies to enhance cell fate commitment.

The paper constructs a healthy human pancreas reference atlas to contextualize disease states and benchmark models.

This paper introduces MIRACLES, a method to image cell membrane potential dynamics using vibrational optoacoustic detection, and demonstrates its application in monitoring glucose-stimulated insulin secretion in beta-cells.

This study characterizes pancreatic adaptations during porcine pregnancy, identifying new protein targets involved in endocrine cell remodeling and highlighting potential therapeutic targets for gestational diabetes.

This study identifies ΔNP63 as a marker for exocrine-committed multipotent progenitors in the murine pancreas, showing its role in exocrine development and differentiation.

This study benchmarks porcine pancreatic ductal organoids (PPDO) against human pancreatic ductal organoids (HPDO) and primary porcine pancreas using scRNA-Seq, showing PPDO's potential for drug screening with conserved toxicity profiles.

The paper identifies a primed endothelial progenitor that requires VEGF/ERK inhibition to differentiate into vein endothelial cells, revealing a two-step process for vein development.

This study improves the safety of stem cell-derived islets by enriching endocrine cells and reducing off-target cell types, enhancing long-term in vivo outcomes.

moscot unifies optimal transport for temporal, spatial and spatiotemporal single-cell mapping, using multimodal cost spaces and low-rank solvers to scale to 1.7 million mouse embryo cells.

This study shows chronic intermittent fasting impairs β-cell maturation and function in adolescent mice, but not in adults, with similar patterns observed in human type 1 diabetes.

This study integrates multi-omics data to identify genetic variants and molecular mechanisms associated with type 2 diabetes and highlights potential drug targets.

The paper captures two human axial stem cell states and identifies regulatory networks and mechanisms underlying their maintenance and differentiation.

This paper integrates multiple scRNA-seq datasets to create a mouse islet atlas, revealing new insights into β-cell states and differences across diabetes models.

This study identifies Synaptotagmin 13 as a key regulator of endocrine cell egression and islet formation through its role in cell polarity and basement membrane remodeling.

This study shows that a hypercaloric diet causes temporary molecular changes in astrocytes specifically in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus.

CellRank maps cell fates in single-cell RNA sequencing data by integrating RNA velocity and trajectory inference, revealing novel regeneration trajectories in lung injury.

The paper presents a statistical framework for experimental design and power analysis in single cell RNA-seq studies, showing that higher power is achieved with shallow sequencing of more cells per individual.

This paper generates a Nkx6-1 Venus fusion reporter mouse line to track and isolate Nkx6-1-expressing cells, including pancreatic β-cells, during development and in adult tissues.

The paper identifies LIN28A as a key factor in mRNA decay during epiblast morphogenesis, linking cell identity changes to embryonic growth through nucleo-cytoplasmic translocation.

The paper identifies Wnt/PCP-activated Lgr5+ intestinal stem cells that directly differentiate into enteroendocrine or Paneth cells, challenging previous models of multipotency.

This study shows that Sox17 expression in cardiac progenitor cells biases their fate toward the endocardium and regulates myocardium development through NOTCH signaling in mice.

This study shows that Foxa2 binding site selection is influenced by chromatin environment and that chromatin opening requires collaboration with other transcription factors during endoderm differentiation.

The paper introduces pseudodynamics, a framework to model real-time cellular development using time-series and genetic knock-out data, applied to thymic T-cell maturation.