“We all are interested in where we came from and how our life began. It’s amazing that each of us – with our physical complexity, our emotional complexity and all the complexity that makes us human beings – all started off as a single cell. I find it fascinating to study how that cell divided and turned into a complex organism with so many dimensions.
“It excites me because it’s studying life itself.”
Professor Peter Koopman is head of the Division of Molecular Genetics and Development at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. His research team are trying to pinpoint the important genes of embryogenesis.
“The human body contains several millions of cells and many thousands of cell types. We study how genes drive the development of the embryo from a single cell to a complex organism. My work is trying to find the genes that direct the development of the different cell types and direct the assembly of those cell types into functional organs.”
Professor Koopman is a Federation Fellow of the Australian Research Council and the author of over 160 papers. His research team use molecular, cellular, organ culture and mouse embryo technologies to investigate complex gene networks. His work falls into the National Research Priorities under the theme of a healthy start to life.
“Specifically, I’m dealing with the early part of life and the basic premise that health and our susceptibility to disease is determined in the foetal period. By studying how genes regulate embryonic development, we’re studying how the body is set up and how our susceptibility to disease is established.
“It’s also important to understand basic mechanisms that drive cell differentiation and morphogenesis (the development of embryonic form), because a lot of these basic mechanisms go awry in diseases like cancer. If we can understand how cells develop normally, we can also understand how cancerous cells develop abnormally.”
Professor Koopman’s lab also has a special interest in the genetic control of sexual dimorphism and gonadal development. In the late 1980s, he was part of the team that discovered the Y-chromosomal sex-determining gene, Sry, one of the most important findings of biology in the last century.
More recently, Professor Koopman’s research group discovered the mechanism by which germ cells in the embryo enter the pathway of spermatogenesis or oogenesis, a discovery that may lead to methods for producing functional gametes from germline stem cells in vitro.
In the end, Professor Koopman is simply fascinated by basic research and driven by curiosity.
“How can one gene set in train the differences that arise between men and women? They’re just so different.”
This article was based on an interview between Science Hub and Professor Peter Koopman in May 2009; on his seminar, ‘Are we there yet? The long road to grant success’, presented March 2008 in the 2008 Career Development and Grant Writing Seminar Series jointly organised by the postdoctoral associations of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and Howard Florey Institute; and on biographical and bibliographic information from NCBI and Professor Koopman’s website at the University of Queensland.
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“It excites me because it’s studying life itself.”
Professor Peter Koopman is head of the Division of Molecular Genetics and Development at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland.
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