Mike Taylor

Biography

I graduated in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 1981, and was awarded my PhD in 1985, also from Cambridge, for research on signaling mechanisms in mammalian cells. Then followed two “post-docs” using the model organism, the frog Xenopus laevis. First, I was awarded an EMBO Long Term Fellowship to work (1985-1986) in Prof M. Mechali’s lab in the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris, France on the analysis of newly discovered proto-oncogenes in development. Second (1987-1991), I analysed muscle gene expression in the lab of Prof Sir John Gurdon (2012 Nobel laureate), first in the Department of Zoology, Cambridge University, and then in The Wellcome/CRC Institute in Cambridge (now The Gurdon Institute). During this time I was also a Research Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. In 1991 I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to set up my own lab in the Zoology Department, Cambridge and to change model organism to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. I exploited molecular genetic approaches to uncover novel genes in muscle differentiation. In 2000, I moved to the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, and took up a Senior Lectureship, continuing with research centred on the fly muscle differentiation program. Between 2005-10 I was on the steering group of “MYORES”, an EU FP6 Network of Excellence on muscle development, function and repair, and co-ordinated one of its six constituent research programmes. I served on the committee of the British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) from 2004 until 2013. For the last five years of this time I was the BSDB secretary. I was promoted to Reader in 2012.

Research Interest

Our research centres on the genetic programs of cell differentiation, the process by which specific types of cell are formed from stem cells or progenitor cells. Cell differentiation programs underpin the production of specialised tissues during animal development and, more generally, their mechanistic principles lie at the heart of much biology, medicine and biotechnology. An in-depth knowledge of these programs is critical for understanding aspects of disease and ageing, and for a range of applications, including stem cell technology and tissue repair. Cell differentiation programs are controlled by proteins called transcription factors that switch genes on and off. A principle focus of our research is how these factors specifically regulate genes. Much of our work uses the classic model organism, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. It has an impressive history in making fundamental contributions to understanding human biology, and moreover allows insights relevant to ourselves to be uncovered relatively rapidly.