Greg Beitel, PhD

Associate Director, Center for Genetic Medicine
Feinberg School of Medicine

Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology
Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

Research Interests
Greg Beitel’s laboratory's long term goal is to understand how individual cells control their shapes and coordinate with other cells to create the complex organs found in multicellular organisms. To this end, they are using genetic, molecular and cell biological approaches to identify and study genes required for the morphogenesis of the Drosophila tracheal system.

The Drosophila tracheal system is a ramifying network of epithelial tubes that serves as a combined airway and vascular system for delivering oxygen to tissues in the fly. At the molecular level, Drosophila tracheal development has striking similarities to both vertebrate lung and vascular development. These similarities, coupled with the simplicity of the tracheal system and the power of Drosophila genetics, makes the tracheal system an outstanding model system for understanding the morphogenesis of the tubular epithelia that are central to such vertebrate organs as the vascular system, lung and kidney.

Dr. Beitel’s research has shown that size of the Drosophila tracheal tubes is controlled by a genetic program and has identified mutations in eight genes that cause the tracheal tubes to have abnormal lengths or diameters. They have also identified mutations that affect cell-cell junctions and the apical/basal organization of tracheal cells. His lab is currently cloning and characterizing several of these genes, and will pursue the vertebrate homologues of these genes to understand the general roles of these genes in the morphogenesis of tubular epithelial organs.