Marlis successfully defended her PhD thesis

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 postdoc Nat Clarke on his review paper on the cytoskeleton, adhesion, and morphogenesis being published in Current Biology.

Congratulations Jeanne Jodin, for publishing her work “Stable Force Balance between Epithelial Cells Arises from F-Actin Turnover” in Developmental Cell. Jeanne showed that stable force balance between cells in a tissue requires robust actin filament turnover. The paper was also highlighted by the journal. Read the paper and the highlight article.

Postdoctoral fellow, Hannah Yevick, published her research titled Structural redundancy in supracellular actomyosin networks enables robust tissue folding in Developmental Cell. You can hear her talk about what she discovered in the video produced by Raleigh McElvery of the MIT Biology department. Read an MIT News article on the research.

Congratulations Mimi Xie for publishing her work “Loss of Gα12/13 Exacerbates Apical Area-dependence of Actomyosin Contractility” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Mimi showed how apical actin density can depend on apex size. Suppressing this dependence is important to coordinate contractility across a tissue.

Congratulations to graduate student, Marlis Denk-Lobnig, on passing her qualifying exam.