Mary Ann Collins publishes paper from her PhD work in MBoC

Congratulations Claudia on publishing her work “Drosophila Non-muscle Myosin II Motor Activity Determines the Rate of Tissue Folding” in eLife. Claudia demonstrated that myosin 2 motor activity sets the rate of apical constriction and tissue folding, showing that myosin 2 is the motor that drives these processes. This work was the result of a great collaboration with James Sellers’ lab at the National Institutes of Health.

Graduate student, Jaclyn Camuglia, submitted her research “Morphogenetic forces planar polarize LGN/Pins in the embryonic head during Drosophila gastrulation” and posted a preprint. We found that morphogenetic forces are required to orient cell divisions in the Drosophila embryo through a mechanism that establishes polarity of the Pins protein.

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.

Congratulations Jonathan on publishing his work “Apical Sarcomere-like Actomyosin Contracts Nonmuscle Drosophila Epithelial Cells” in Developmental Cell. Jonathan discovered that the apical actin cortex of an epithelial cell can be organized like a muscle sarcomere to promote contraction and tissue folding.

Congratulations to postdoc, Soline Chanet, for being awarded an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship.

Mimi Xie successfully defended her thesis. She gave an excellent seminar to our community. Nice job Mimi!