Elena Kingston wins poster prize

We have a number of new additions to the lab including postdocs Jasmin Imran Alsous and Nat Clarke, graduate students Anna Yeh and Jaclyn Camuglia, undergraduates Prateek Kalakuntla and Jennifer Nwako, and technician Vardges Tserunyan.

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

Congratulations to postdoc, Frank Mason, for the recent publication of his paper, “Apical domain polarization promotes actin-myosin assembly to drive ratchet-like apical constriction” on Nature Cell Biology. In the paper, Mason et al. show that the signals that regulate contractile forces in constricting cells exhibit a spatial organization within the apical domain of the cell. Signals that activate myosin motors are polarized to the center of the apical domain. Actin polymerization in this domain suppresses junctional protein localization, restricting junctional proteins to cell-cell interfaces. Thus, a “radial” cell polarity is established, which is shown to be important for apical constriction.

Congratulations to graduate student, Clint Ko, on publishing his research titled Microtubules promote intercellular contractile force transmission during tissue folding in the Journal of Cell Biology. Clint discovered that microtubules maintain intercellular adhesion by regulating actin.

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