Our research
Research Vision
Welcome to the lab of regenerative biology! We are interested in understanding the ability of organs to recover from injuries and stress. For example, we are able to heal a cut to our finger, even if it happens multiple times. Our blood regenerates after blood donation within a day or two. In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus was sentenced to having half of his liver eaten by an eagle every day, but the liver would regenerate during the night – highlighting the almost infinite regenerative capacity of the liver. We are fascinated by such robustness in regenerative systems – which are a hallmark of a dynamic biological system.
To understand the robustness of regenerative systems, we explore three main themes: adaptation, plasticity and memory. For our experimental model, we use Zebrafish, which posses amazing regenerative abilities. It is able to recover from complete loss of bone cells, liver hepatocytes or pancreatic beta-cells. We utilize its super-natural regenerative ability to explore our themes, with the hope that the lessons we learn can be translated to improve outcomes of human injury.
Lab Website: SinghLab@IRIBHM
The regenerative response of the zebrafish fin after injury
Group members
Sumeet Pal Singh, PhD – Group Leader
Sumeet obtained his B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur in 2008, and his PhD in 2013 from Duke University under the supervision of Dr. Kenneth Poss. His doctoral thesis was focussed on the cellular basis of bone regeneration in the zebrafish fin amputation model. He then pursued his postdoctoral training at CRTD, Dresden, Germany in the laboratory of Dr. Nikolay Ninov on functional and proliferative heterogeneity in the pancreatic beta-cells. His post-doc was supported by fellowships from EFSD/Lilly. He joined the faculty of IRIBHM at ULB in 2019, with a MISU starting grant from FNRS.
Technician
Camille Perazzolo
Camille Perazzolo performed her Bachelor in medical biology with clinical chemistry option at the Paul Lambin Institute (Haute école Da Vinci), where she graduated in June 2012 with Distinction. Since 2012, she has been working at ULB on projects related to zebrafish. She has strong expertise in handing, maintainance and transgenesis of zebrafish, as well as molecular biology and confocal imaging. She is currently focusing on developing tools to visualize the dynamic response of the cells to stress.
PhD Students
Elif Eski
Elif Eski , the lab’s first PhD student, joined on 01 November, 2019. She obtained her M.Sc. degree from Bogazici University, Turkey. During her master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Stefan H. Fuss, she focussed on the role of Wnt/β-catenin signaling during regenerative neurogenesis in adult zebrafish olfactory epithelium. In 2021, Elif received a PhD fellowship from FNRS (ASP) for three years. Elif is focusing her thesis on long-term memory of cellular stress.
Inés Garteizgogeascoa Suñer
Inés Garteizgogeascoa Suñer graduated in Biochemistry from University Autónoma de Madrid, Spain; followed by a M.Sc. degree in Integrative Biology and Physiology from University Claude Bernard de Lyon, France (2019). During her master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Karine Gauthier and Dr.Fréderic Flamant, she focused on studying thyroid hormone-mediated thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue in mice. She was able to identify potential new thermogenic pathways, independent from UCP-1 classic mechanism, regulated by thyroid hormone in response to prolonged cold exposure. She joined the group in 2020 to work on developing tools for imaging of signalling pathways in zebrafish.
Macarena Pozo Morales
Macarena Pozo Morales graduated in Biochemistry at the University of Málaga (Spain) in 2018. During her master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Ma Ángeles Real Avilés and Dr. Alicia Rivera Ramírez, she focused on determining the role of dopaminergic D4 receptor on the effect of cocaine in caudate putamen in rat. At the same time, she worked as intern student in the lab of Dr. Francisco J. Bermúdez Silva and Dr. Isabel González Mariscal in IBIMA (Spain) to study the role of GPR55 on the onset of type 1 diabetes. She joined the group in 2020 where she’s performing her PhD focused on the immediate response to cell stress and cellular plasticity during regeneration.
Publications
Selected Publications:
Loss of tetraspanin-7 expression reduces pancreatic beta-cell exocytosis Ca2+ sensitivity but has limited effect on systemic metabolism, Kerry McLaughlin, Samuel Acreman, Sameena Nawaz, Joseph Cutteridge, Anne Clark, Jakob G. Knudsen, Geoffrey Denwood, Aliya F. Spigelman, Jocelyn E. Manning Fox, Sumeet Pal Singh, Patrick E. MacDonald, Benoit Hastoy, Quan Zhang, Diabetic Medicine, 20 October 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/dme.14984
Qinghao Yu, Hannah E. Walters, Giovanni Pasquini, Sumeet Pal Singh, Daniel León-Periñán, Andreas Petzold, Preethi Kesavan, Cristina Subiran, Ines Garteizgogeascoa, Dunja Knapp, Anne Wagner, Andrea Bernardos, María Alfonso, Gayathri Nadar, Andreas Dahl, Volker Busskamp, Ramón Martínez-Máñez, Maximina H. Yun “Cellular senescence modulates progenitor cell expansion during axolotl limb regeneration”, . bioRxiv, 2022.09.01.506196; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.01.506196
Pozo-Morales, M., Garteizgogeascoa, I., Perazzolo, C., So, J., Shin, D. and Singh, S.P. (2022), “In vivo imaging of calcium dynamics in zebrafish hepatocytes”, Hepatology. Accepted Author Manuscript. https://doi.org/10.1002/hep.32663
Sumeet Pal Singh, Prateek Chawla, Alisa Hnatiuk, Margrit Kamel, Luis F Delgadillo Silva, Bastiaan Spanjaard, Sema Elif Eski, Sharan Janjuha, Pedro Olivares Chauvet, Oezge Kayisoglu, Fabian Rost, Juliane Blasche, Annekathrin Krankel, Andreas Petzold, Thomas Kurth, Susanne Reinhardt, Jan Philipp Junker, Nikolay Ninov.”A single-cell atlas of de novo β-cell regeneration reveals the contribution of hybrid β/δ cells to diabetes recovery in zebrafish”, Development (2022) 149 (2): dev199853. https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.199853
Bernat Elvira; Valerie Vandenbempt; Julia Bauzá-Martinez; Raphaël Crutzen; Javier Negueruela; Hazem Ibrahim; Matthew L. Winder; Manoja K. Brahma; Beata Vekeriotaite; Pieter-Jan Martens; Sumeet Pal Singh; Fernando Rossello; Pascale Lybaert; Timo Otonkoski; Conny Gysemans; Wei Wu; Esteban N. Gurzov “PTPN2 Regulates the Interferon Signaling and Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Response in Pancreatic β-Cells in Autoimmune Diabetes” Diabetes db210443
https://doi.org/10.2337/db21-0443
Macarena Pozo-Morales, Ines Garteizgogeascoa, Camille Perazzolo, Sumeet Pal Singh, “In vivo imaging of calcium dynamics in zebrafish hepatocytes”, bioRxiv 2022.01.11.475536;
https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.11.475536
M. I. Pronobis, S. Zheng, S. P. Singh, and K. D. Poss, “In vivo proximity labeling identifies cardiomyocyte protein networks during zebrafish heart regeneration,” bioRxiv, p. 2021.01.19.427246, Jan. 2021.
P. Gillotay, M. P. Shankar, S. E. Eski, S. Reinhardt, A. Kraenkel, J. Blaesche, A. Petzold, G. Kesavan, C. Lange, M. Brand, V. Detours, S. Costagliola, and S. P. Singh, “Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals cell-cell communication and thyrocyte diversity in the zebrafish thyroid gland, EMBO Rep, vol. n/a, no. n/a, p. e50612, Nov. 2020.
Sumeet Pal Singh§, Sharan Janjuha, Samata Chaudhuri, Susanne Reinhardt, Annekathrin Kränkel, Sevina Dietz, Anne Eugster, Halil Bilgin, Selçuk Korkmaz, Gökmen Zararsız, Nikolay Ninov & John E. Reid (2019). Machine learning based classification of cells into chronological stages using single-cell transcriptomics. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35218-5
§Corresponding author
Sharan Janjuha*, Sumeet Pal Singh*, Nikolay Ninov (2018). Analysis of Beta-cell Function Using Single-cell Resolution Calcium Imaging in Zebrafish Islets. Journal of Visualized Experiments. doi:10.3791/57851
* Co-Authors
Sharan Janjuha*, Sumeet Pal Singh*, Anastasia Tsakmaki, S Neda Mousavy Gharavy, Priyanka Murawala, Judith Konantz, Sarah Birke, David J Hodson, Guy A Rutter, Gavin A Bewick, Nikolay Ninov (2018). Age-related islet inflammation marks the proliferative decline of pancreatic beta-cells in zebrafish. eLife. doi:10.7554/eLife.32965
* Co-Authors
Sumeet Pal Singh, Sharan Janjuha, Theresa Hartmann, Özge Kayisoglu, Judith Konantz, Sarah Birke, Priyanka Murawala, Ezzaldin Ahmed Alfar, Kei Murata, Anne Eugster, Naoki Tsuji, Edward R. Morrissey, Michael Brand & Nikolay Ninov (2017). Different developmental histories of beta-cells generate functional and proliferative heterogeneity during islet growth. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00461-3
Sumeet Pal Singh, Jennifer E. Holdway, Kenneth D. Poss (2012). Regeneration of amputated zebrafish fin rays from de novo osteoblasts. Developmental Cell. doi:10.1016/j.devcel.2012.03.006