The people behind the papers – Charisios Tsiairis, Jaroslav Ferenc and Marylène Bonvin

Hydra, a freshwater polyp, comprises a simple oral-aboral body plan, wherein multipotent epithelial cells differentiate into tentacle cells at the oral/mouth end and into basal disc cells at the aboral/foot end. In their study, Charisios Tsiairis and colleagues show that a double negative mutually repressive regulatory module determines oral/aboral cell fate specification in Hydra. To know more about their work, we spoke to the first authors, Jaroslav Ferenc and Marylène Bonvin, and the corresponding author, Charisios Tsiairis, Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.