Dr. Lwigale is a developmental biologist who studies the stem cells that make the cornea in the eye during embryonic development and participate in healing the cornea after injury. He studies these processes in chick and mouse embryos.

Dr. Lwigale came to the United States from Uganda to attend the University of Northern Iowa, where he earned both his undergraduate and Master’s degrees. He then went on to a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Kansas State University, which he finished in 4 years (!). He was a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Rice in 2008. He earned tenure in 2015.

As an embryo develops, cells gradually become more specialized to fill specific roles throughout the body. This process is called differentiation, and different kinds of cells can be categorized by how differentiated they are. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells, which can produce more of themselves, but can also produce cells more differentiated than themselves. (This is why stem cells are important for renewing your skin, blood, etc.)

Neural crest cells are a type of stem cell that exists early on in embryonic development. They travel all over the body and contribute cells to making the skin, face, eye, bones, nervous system, and heart. So obviously there’s a lot of interest in understanding how they work: if something goes wrong with the neural crest cells, it could affect many parts of the body.

Dr. Lwigale is interested in neural crest cells because most of the cells in the cornea - the transparent part in the front of the eye - differentiate from neural crest cells. Specifically, he wants to learn what tells the neural crest cells where to go and when/how to differentiate into cornea cells.

In a recent study, he used chicken embryos, where the timing is cornea development is well known. He sequenced RNA from different time points during cornea development and looked for genes where the expression was different between time points. (These genes must be either turned up or turned down in their expression over time.) He generated a long list of genes that are likely involved in cornea differentiation at different points in the process, and used other methods to confirm some of them.

Because differentiation depends in large part on signals from neighboring cells, Dr. Lwigale also looked specifically at genes related to receiving and interpreting those signals in his dataset. These signaling pathways are large and diverse with many components, and with his dataset, Dr. Lwigale was able to narrow down which of those components were possibly involved.

All in all, this study provides a lot of good new directions to follow up on in understanding how neural crest cells differentiate into corneal cells.