The formation and physiology of organs is one of the fundamental mysteries of biology: how are multiple cell types specified within an organ? How is the development of organ precursors coordinated in space and time? And how does an organ respond to changing environmental conditions throughout the life of an animal? Although regulators of organ development and function have been identified, the mechanisms by which they orchestrate the molecular and cellular events of organogenesis are still unclear.

The Mango lab studies organ development and physiology using a simple organ, the C. elegans pharynx (or foregut), which nonetheless faces the same hurdles that confront organs in more complex animals. Our work has revealed that there are ‘organ identity’ genes that specify organ fate regardless of the cell types within the organ (e.g. pharyngeal muscle, pharyngeal nerve etc.). We have combined molecular and genomic approaches to investigate how one organ identity gene, the transcription factor PHA-4, coordinates pharynx development in embryos. More recently, we have extended our studies to probe how C. elegans worms sense and respond to food availability.

The Mango lab participates in the broader developmental biology community at the University of Utah Developmental Biology (DBIG) Link