Allon Klein
The Klein lab is fascinated by the question of how stem cells choose between alternative fates in developing and adult tissues... Today, one can strip differentiated cells of their fate by inducing pluripotency, yet it remains exceedingly difficult to target differentiating stem cells to a specific fate. His work focuses on germ layer specification in the South African claw-toed frog, Xenopus Laevis, which is a powerful system for studying cell fate choice and differentiation in a "native" biological context (rather than in cell culture). He is currently studying collective fluctuations of groups of genes, measured at the single-cell level, to test several possible hypotheses for how different fates are selected. Dr. Klein's research combines (1) traditional experimental methods used to study developmental perturbations, (2) novel assays for gene expression in hundreds of individual cells, (3) statistical tools for analyzing gene expression fluctuations, and (4) theoretical tools for characterizing stochastic cell fate decisions.
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About Allon: Throughout Allon Klein’s career, he has been interested in how cells make decisions. This is a multi-scale problem, with explanations spanning from identifying ‘molecular instabilities’ that drive regulatory networks to one of several stable states, to defining interactions across tissues and even organisms. Understanding cellular decision-making also requires determining how cells and tissues maintain discrete phenotypes over many years of life. These problems cannot be solved using any single discipline. Dr. Klein worked on these problems first as a statistical physicist in his PhD with Dr. Ben Simons (Cambridge), before transitioning into experimental biology and computational genomics during a postdoc with Dr. Marc Kirschner. To address these general questions, the Klein lab develops new assays, technologies and theoretical methods.