Proper progression of development and differentiation relies on complex spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression. This is beautifully demonstrated in the early Drosophila embryo, where, within 2-3 hours, gene expression patterns restricted in time and space, give rise to a blueprint of the adult fly. Complementing my background in high-throughput genomic approaches, I am interested in establishing and employing live-imaging and genome editing technics to explore how this tight regulation is ‘encoded’ in complex regulatory sequences. For example, how is the regulatory information distributed amongst multiple enhancers and promoters and what is the role of chromatin and DNA topology and it’s dynamic readout? With endogenous sequence perturbation coupled to single cell quantitative analysis we aim to explore determinants of the transcriptional output as well as phenotypic consequences on the developing embryo.