Ace Lewis publishes first-author paper on trachea development in Cell Reports

A new publication in Cell Reports from first-author Ace Lewis focuses on how the trachea and esophagus separate during mammalian embryonic development. The trachea and esophagus form by separation from one single tube of definitive endoderm. Though it was previously known that the transcription factor, NKX2-1 is important for trachea development, and for the separation of the trachea from the esophagus, it was not clear how it did so. In this paper, we show that NKX2-1 directly represses the EPHRIN-B2 signaling molecule to establish a boundary against trachea and esophagus cell mixing and enables tissue separation. This study isthe first to connect the cell fate specification programs in the foregut with the morphogenetic tissue separation program, a question that is not well-studied in organogenesis more broadly.