Fred Etoc

This study investigates YAP's role in early ectodermal specification and its link to Huntington's Disease using human neuruloids, finding YAP activation influences ectodermal fate and that reducing YAP activity can partially rescue HD phenotypes.

The paper uses light-induced SHH signaling to self-organize human dorsal-ventral forebrain structures from hESCs and validates this with scRNA-seq.

This study shows that HTT-CAG expansion in human gastruloids causes ectodermal compartment reduction and altered TGFβ signaling due to polarity defects, indicating early developmental HD effects.

The paper shows that NOGGIN and BMP4 are secreted into opposite extracellular spaces in human epiblasts, with NOGGIN inhibiting BMP4 through apical-to-basal transcytosis.

The paper shows that WNT signaling memory enables ACTIVIN to act as a morphogen in human gastruloids by allowing graded responses to ACTIVIN without altering SMAD2 dynamics.

The paper generates a 3D human epiblast model to study axial symmetry breaking, showing BMP4 induces symmetry breaking through WNT3 and DKK1.