Soline Chanet publishes a book chapter
Congratulations Soline on the publication of a book chapter Mechanical Force Sensing in Tissues!
Congratulations Soline on the publication of a book chapter Mechanical Force Sensing in Tissues!
Jonathan comes to us from the Harvard Biophysics PhD program and Mary Ann did her PhD on nuclear movement in muscle.
Congratulations Fernando on a productive summer and successfully presenting your poster at the end of summer program. We look forward to seeing what you do in the future!
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 graduate student Claudia Vasquez on her publication “Dynamic myosin phosphorylation regulates contractile pulses and tissue integrity during epithelial morphogenesis” in The Journal of Cell Biology. Claudia’s paper was also highlighted in a video interview with the JCB news editor.
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 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.