Congratulations Dr. Xie

Anthony is the newest postdoc in the lab. Anthony comes to us from the MIT Mechanical Engineering PHD program.

Congratulations Mary Ann Collins on publishing review article on plant and animal morphogenesis in Developmental Cell!

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 graduate student, Natalie Heer, on giving an excellent research presentation and successfully defending her thesis. Best of luck at your new position as a Data Scientist.

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.

Jonathan comes to us from the Harvard Biophysics PhD program and Mary Ann did her PhD on nuclear movement in muscle.