De Val Group: for non-specialists
An introduction to the regulation of blood vessel development. The transcript of this video can be found here.
An introduction to how blood vessels develop
Our body contains many different types of blood vessels. In our lab, we are trying to understand the processes that control the growth of each type of blood vessel, so we can develop better ways to manipulate them - for example, to stop blood vessels growing in tumours or to grow new vessels in a damaged heart. To understand this process, we investigate how blood vessel genes are switched on by different triggers.
We study the enhancers (the on/off switches) to identify which transcription factors, and upstream signals, are responsible for each type of vessel.