4D Cellular Physiology (4DCP) seeks to unravel life’s greatest mystery: how thousands to trillions of cells self-organize, communicate, and cooperate to form organs and a wide variety of organisms capable of adapting to ever-changing environments.
Recognizing that cells are the basic unit of life, 4DCP aims to develop tools capable of peering into the secret lives of individual cells in native tissue environments, probing their structure and function, and use computational approaches to decipher the language by which cells communicate to enable emergent physiological functions.
Within these broader aspirations, the 4DCP research program at Janelia is currently focused on studying 1) how the nervous system mediates communication between the brain and body, 2) the formation of multicellular organisms in development and their ultimate decline during aging, and 3) the dynamics of metabolism, measured at a cellular and subcellular level, and its influence on tissue physiology.
By bridging the gap between systems-level phenomena studied by physiologists and cellular processes scrutinized by cell biologists, the 4D Cellular Physiology (4DCP) research area aims to bring physiology within reach of mechanistic cell biology.
7/18/24 | Alejandro Aguilera Castrejon
While getting his bachelor’s degree, Aguilera Castrejon discovered developmental biology and stem cell research and knew he had found his path, one that led him from Mexico to Israel and now to Ashburn, VA, where he is a new group leader in Janelia’s 4D Cellular Physiology research area.
06/17/24 | New ‘aging atlas’ provides a detailed map of how cells and tissues age
Researchers have profiled gene expression in each cell of adult roundworms at different times during the aging process for both wildtype and long-lived strains, creating a complete transcriptomic cell atlas of aging in roundworms.
02/21/24 | Researchers probe protein changes in the cell’s scavenger centers to understand longevity
New research details how lysosomes – the structures inside cells that degrade and recycle waste -- change their protein composition as organisms become long-lived, providing new insights into the role these organelles and their associated proteins play in regulating longevity.
02/02/23 | Keeping TEMPO: New tool tracks cells during development
TEMPO is a new tool that enables scientists to track and genetically modify consecutive generations of cells in vertebrates, including zebrafish and mice.
6/8/22 | Welcome to our new lab heads in 4DCP
Head of 4D Cellular Physiology
Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz leads the 4DCP research area. Her research on the machinery inside cells has led to novel insights about the dynamics of cells and their organelles. Lippincott-Schwartz has been a senior group leader at Janelia since 2016.
Co-Head of 4D Cellular Physiology
Ron Vale is the co-head of 4DCP. He studies the molecular motor proteins kinesin and dynein, which power the movement of membranes and chromosomes along microtubules inside cells, and explores the role of the cytoskeleton in cell division and cell shape. Vale has been at Janelia since 2020.
AI Scientists
Group Leaders
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Postdocs
Multiple labs are recruiting postdocs. Please see each lab webpage for more details.
Learn more about postdoc life at Janelia.
Doctoral Students
More information can be found here.
“The body is a cell state in which every cell is a citizen.”
Rudolph Virchow, 1858
