My group is based in the Institute of Genetics of the Heinrich-Heine-University and we are interested in the communication of cells during organ development in metazoans. We focus our attention on the dissection of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the signal transduction through the Notch signalling pathway. This pathway exists in probably all metazoans and plays a fundamental role in a great number of developmental and homeostatic processes as well as diseases in humans. We use Drosophila melanogaster as our main model system, but have also established the mouse as a second model in the lab to evaluate the general implications of our findings in Drosophila.