Dr. Antonio Scialdone

Antonio Scialdone leads the research group “Physics and Data-Based Modelling of Cellular Identity Changes” at the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells, Helmholtz Munich, where he has been a Junior and then a tenured Group Leader since 2017. The group is co-affiliated with the Institute of Computational Biology and the Institute of Functional Epigenetics.

Trained as a theoretical physicist, Antonio’s journey into biology began during his Master’s studies, where he first encountered the application of statistical mechanics to address open questions in living systems. This cross-disciplinary passion has shaped every stage of his career, from modelling X-chromosome inactivation and chromatin spatial organisation during his PhD in Naples, to studying resource allocation in plants during his postdoc at the John Innes Centre, to pioneering single-cell RNA-sequencing tools and applying them to mouse embryogenesis at EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

At the heart of his research programme lies the question: what are the physical principles and molecular mechanisms that allow cells to acquire, maintain, and switch identities? To address this, the group integrates single-cell and spatial omics, machine learning, and mathematical modelling, generating quantitative predictions that are tested in close collaboration with experimental partners. Current work spans the transcriptional dynamics of mouse and human gastrulation, the role of cellular competition as a quality-control mechanism in early embryonic development, and the spatial organisation of olfactory sensory neuron diversity. The lab also investigates how metabolism controls fate decisions in the epiblast, and how the biomechanics of gastrulation interplay with transcriptional programmes.

Key contributions include the first single-cell transcriptomic characterisation of a gastrulating human embryo (Nature, 2021) and a 3D transcriptomics atlas of the mouse olfactory mucosa (Cell Reports, 2022).