Jonathan Jackson passed qualifying exam

Mingmar joined us this summer from the University of Alabama at Birmingham as our new Technical Associate, welcome!

Congratulations to graduate student, Mimi Xie, for her publication “Intracellular signalling and intercellular coupling coordinate heterogeneous contractile events to facilitate tissue folding” in Nature Communications. In the paper, Mimi showed that cells exhibit three classes of contractile events, unconstricting, unratcheted, and ratcheted. Mimi demonstrated that cells undergo transitions between different classes of contractions, going from unconstricting or unratcheted contractions to ratcheted contractions. A transcription factor that regulates this developmental stage is important for the proper order of contractile events. It is important for cells to generate ratcheted contractions because this promotes cooperation between cells.

Congratulations to Soline on publishing her work “Myosin 2-Induced Mitotic Rounding Enables Columnar Epithelial Cells to Interpret Cortical Spindle Positioning Cues” in Current Biology. Soline showed how mitotic cell rounding is critical to orient cell division such that both daughter cells remain in the tissue.

Congratulations to Soline on publishing her work “Actomyosin Meshwork Mechanosensing Enables Tissue Shape to Orient Cell Force” in Nature Communications. Soline discovered a mechanism by which tissue and organism shape can instruct cells how to generate force. This has implications in understanding how tissues and organs acquire their correct shape.

Congratulations to Jaci Camuglia and Anna Yeh on passing their Ph.D. candidacy exams! Excited to see what research directions we go in over the next few years.