Ricardo Barrientos

I am looking at tissue mechanics, specifically folding of the Drosophila Melanogaster wing disc during development. Drosophila is a useful model system for the study of morphogenesis due to the development of a sophisticated genetic control system to investigate the role of key structural proteins. The wing disc itself exhibits a unique folding pattern. These folds emerge during development, possibly due to physical interaction of layers in the tissue, including squamous and columnar epithelia, and extra-cellular matrices. I will be taking a biophysical approach, combining both experimental and theoretical techniques to attempt to unravel the mechanical contributions to folding from the different layers of the wing disc.