The overall goal of our research is to understand how the information contained in animal genomes transforms into coordinated cellular behaviors that collectively represent development. It can be argued that the most direct manifestation of the genomic program is the tissue specific regulation of gene expression. Therefore, by describing the gene expression patterns in the context of cellular anatomy of the developing system, we take the necessary, first step towards understanding the information transfer from genome sequences to developmental processes. We combine wet-lab and informatics approaches working closely with experimentalists as well as the growing group of computational biologists in Dresden.