Lucy O'Brien

Lucy Erin O’Brien, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University School of Medicine

Research Description: Dr. O’Brien was appointed as an assistant professor in 2013 and her research program seeks to understand the interplay between epithelial stem and differentiated cells in vivo. As a postdoc, she discovered adaptive intestinal resizing of the Drosophila midgut and characterized the role of an intestinal insulin-like peptide, dILP3, in activating stem cell divisions to drive tissue growth downstream of feeding (O’Brien et al, Cell 2011; see below). Her work established the midgut as a powerful system to study stem cell and tissue dynamics through imaging-based quantitative analysis, targeted genetic manipulations, and lineage tracing. At Stanford, her independent lab has pioneered the image-based analysis of cell populations, developed long-term live midgut imaging, and created novel, computational and bio-engineering-based approaches to track and manipulate midgut cells.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Koyama LAJ, Aranda-Díaz A, Su YH, Balachandra S, Martin JL, Ludington WB, Huang KC, O'Brien LE. Bellymount enables longitudinal, intravital imaging of abdominal organs and the gut microbiota in adult Drosophila. PLoS Biol. 2020 Jan 27;18(1):e3000567. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000567. PMID: 31986129; PMCID: PMC7004386. 

  2. Martin JL, Sanders EN, Moreno-Roman P, Jaramillo Koyama LA, Balachandra S, Du X, O'Brien LE. Long-term live imaging of the Drosophila adult midgut reveals real-time dynamics of division, differentiation and loss. Elife. 2018 Nov 14;7:e36248. doi: 10.7554/eLife.36248. PMID: 30427308; PMCID: PMC6277200. 

  3. Kim AA, Nekimken AL, Fechner S, O'Brien LE, Pruitt BL. Microfluidics for mechanobiology of model organisms. Methods Cell Biol. 2018;146:217-259. doi: 10.1016/bs.mcb.2018.05.010. PMID: 30037463; PMCID: PMC6418080.