Alfandari and Colleagues Are First to Characterize Two Crucial Factors in Embryos

Co-investigators Dominique Alfandari and Helen Cousins, veterinary & animal sciences and M2M, with others at MIT, report in a new paper that they have for the first time described how two transcription factors that are “absolutely essential for human development” are regulated by a cell surface metalloprotease known as ADAM13. The discovery adds to knowledge of how cells migrate in vertebrate embryos, how stem cells differentiate and how cancer cells metastasize.