Galko Laboratory

Ultimately, we wish to understand in molecular detail how the activities of diverse damage-responsive cell types are coordinated in space and time to give a functional tissue repair program. To pursue these interests we have developed a variety of tissue repair/response assays in the highly genetically tractable model organism, Drosophila melanogaster and are focusing our efforts on two critical responses: epidermal wound closure and nociceptive sensitization  which is the lowering of the threshold for sensing painful stimuli following injury.  

Given that tissue repair responses are an ancient survival mechanism of multicellular animals, we expect that the functional importance of many of the genes we identify will be conserved between flies and vertebrates.

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