How do you build an organ? During development, cells need to make decisions on what cell type to become, and how they should be organized to ensure proper functioning of the organ. For example, blood vessels in the lung need to be organized in the right manner to ensure gas exchange. We are interested in understanding how this is achieved during the embryonic development of the lung. These images show different stages of lung development, what state the cells building the blood vessels are in (mature or immature), and how they are organized within the tissue. 

Here we are looking at the distribution of progenitor (cyan) and differentiated (magenta) endothelial cells in the embryonic mouse lung