'The Microscopists' is a podcast from Bitesize Bio and ZEISS Microscopy that aims to bring you into revealing, entertaining, and personal meetings with the great microscopists of our time. The host Dr Peter O’Toole has interviewed Prisca in September 2021 to learn more about Prisca’s training as a chemist, her research into organoids, her inner drive, and why it sometimes pays off to take risks.

Multicellular organisms are composed of cells and tissues with identical genomes but different properties and functions. They all develop from one cell to form multicellular structures of astounding complexity. During development, in a series of spatio-temporal coordinated steps, cells differentiate into different cell types and establish tissue-scale architectures and functions. Throughout life, continuous tissue renewal and regeneration is required for tissue homeostasis, which also requires fine-tuned spatio-temporal coordination of cells. How cellular interactions generate the specific contexts and spatio-temporal coordination underlying development and regeneration is a key question in biology and we specifically investigate what are the molecular and physical mechanisms that allow a cell, in a tissue, to sense its complex environment, to take individual coordinated decisions. And what are the design principles governing coordinated cellular behavior during tissue organization? We take three main approaches using single cell technologies to tackle these questions: (i) We investigate the molecular mechanisms of intestinal organoid self-organization with a special focus on the role of cell-to-cell variability in populations of differentiating cells. (II) We use human organoids from patients to understand regeneration of the intestine. (III) We use different in vitro self-organizing systems, such as gastruloids to reveal general design principles of self-organization and how tissues use distinctive strategies to maintain homeostasis and repair lost cells.