Randall Widelitz
University of Southern California, CA·Biology
Skin is patterned at a surprisingly large scale: feathers line up in rows, hairs space themselves evenly, and pigment forms stripes that run for millimeters along an animal's body. Chemical signals that diffuse between neighboring cells can explain patterns a few cell-widths across, but not patterns millimeters wide.
- Fields
Biology
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
bioelectricity
skin morphogenesis
feather bud
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Map the natural bioelectric landscape of developing avian skin explants and test how much feather bud orientation depends on it, building on the finding that synchronized calcium channel oscillations in bud dermal cells set elongation direction.
- Determine how ion channels and gap junctions, the protein channels linking neighboring cells' interiors, exchange signals with epidermal Shh and other morphogens such as WNT, BMP and FGF during feather bud patterning.
- Test whether gap-junction-coupled electrical signaling sets the millimeter-scale width and spacing of the black and yellow pigment stripes in Japanese quail, a pattern too large to be explained by classical reaction-diffusion chemistry.
- Perturb bioelectric signaling in skin explants using applied electric currents and optogenetic gene activation, which switches genes on with light, to test whether electrical gradients are required to organize large-scale pigment and feather patterns.
More about the research
Something must carry information over long distances quickly. This work investigates whether bioelectricity — voltage differences and ion flows across cell membranes, in tissues that are not nerves — supplies that long-range channel, and how it works together with the familiar chemical signals to build skin and its appendages during development and regeneration.
Why it matters
Understanding how electrical signals guide tissue patterning adds a largely missing layer to the standard chemical account of how skin, feathers and hair form. Because bioelectric signaling also operates in wound healing, methods that manipulate ion channels, gap junctions or applied electric fields could eventually be explored as ways to improve skin and skin-appendage regeneration after injury.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cheng-Ming Chuong
University of Southern California, CA·Biology
Test whether skin morphogenesis is built from linked sensor–actuator modules that turn physical cues, such as adhesion forces and ECM pulling, into gene activity, using living skin and organ explants.
Amy Shyer
Rockefeller University, NY·Biology·Early-career
Map where and when morphogens, developmental signals, are expressed in the forming skin follicle, and link that activity to gene expression profiles and multicellular architecture.
Ricardo Mallarino
Princeton University, NJ·Biology
Determine how the signaling center of the sugar glider's gliding membrane (patagium) is established and how the gene Wnt5a controls membrane outgrowth, using spatial transcriptomics and in vivo transgenics.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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