CeMM Landsteiner Lecture 2026: "Where babies come from: The invisible storyline of development, from zygote to newborn"

How does a single-cell zygote transform into a complex, free-living newborn composed of over 500 million cells in just three weeks?

Join us for the 2026 CeMM Landsteiner Lecture as Jay Shendure (University of Washington) explores the frontiers of developmental biology. Professor Shendure will detail his lab’s pioneering efforts to reconstruct the entirety of mouse development at single-cell resolution using two revolutionary strategies.

The house mouse is an exceptional model system in biology and medicine, combining powerful genetic tractability with close evolutionary affinity to humans. Mouse pregnancy lasts only three weeks, during which its genome orchestrates the astonishing transformation of a single-cell zygote into a free-living newborn composed of more than 500 million cells.

Jay Shendure says: "In this lecture, I will describe our ongoing efforts to reconstruct the entirety of mouse development at single-cell resolution using two complementary strategies. First, we analyze whole embryos at many different stages of development and measure the molecular state of individual cells. These high-resolution “snapshots” are then assembled computationally into a continuous time-lapse movie of development. Second, we use a method called “molecular recording”, in which living cells become their own historians by writing information about molecular events during their development directly into their DNA. This allows us to reconstruct genetic family trees of cells and trace how different tissues and organs arise.

Finally, I will argue that model organisms remain indispensable in the age of AI, and that evolutionary transfer learning at the scale of the whole organism may represent our best path toward predictive models of human development, health, and disease."