Aubin, Jane

Biography

Aubin, Jane, Professor PhD, University of Toronto  Medical Sciences Building, Room 4245  1 King's College Circle  Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8  Aubin, Jane, Professor PhD, University of Toronto  Medical Sciences Building, Room 4245  1 King's College Circle  Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8 

Research Interest

Research in my lab is focused on development and postnatal activity of the skeleton. Osteogenic, chondrogenic, adipogenic and myogenic cells develop from a pool of mesenchymal stem cells and primitive progenitor populations in bone and bone marrow. One aspect of our work addresses both how to characterize and how to control self-renewal, fate choice, proliferation and differentiation of the stem, progenitor and more mature precursor populations so as to map the developmental hierarchies underlying mesenchymal lineages. To do this, we are assessing the ability of endogenously produced or exogenously supplied hormones, cytokines, and growth factors to influence progenitor proliferation, self-renewal and differentiation to dissect deterministic versus stochastic pathways of mesenchymal cell development. We have acquired evidence for differentiation stage-specific regulatory pathways and for dose-, and time-dependent biphasic effects of many regulators of interest. We are also interested in the regulatory and developmental basis of the phenotypic heterogeneity we have documented in post-proliferative mature cell phenotypes in the developing and mature skeleton.