Congratulations Dr. Xie

Elena, our new Technical Assistant, graduated from Swarthmore College in May 2014. Elena spent a summer doing research in David Stern’s lab at Janelia Farm.

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

Congratulations to postdoc, Hannah Yevick, for publishing her review article “Quantitative Analysis of Cell Shape and the Cytoskeleton in Developmental Biology” in WIREs Developmental Biology.

Congratulations to graduate student, Marlis Denk-Lobnig, who was featured in the MIT Biology department news. Read the article.

The Martin lab won the coveted group costume competition for the Biology department Halloween party. They had a winning combination of fish-like pillows and various forms of wasabi.

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.