Soline Chanet publishes a book chapter

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 Frank on publishing his work “LRhoA GTPase Inhibition Organizes Contraction During Epithelial Morphogenesis” in The Journal of Cell Biology! Frank showed how inhibiting RhoA can promote contraction during tissue folding. And read the Spotlight article on our paper, written by Alpha Yap. Also, congratulations on your new position as a Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University!

Congratulations Dr. Yeh on defending your PhD and getting a job in industry! We wish her the best of luck.

Congratulations to graduate student, Claudia Vasquez, on passing her qualifying exam.

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.

Biology graduate student, Clint Ko, is joining our lab. Clint was an undergrad at Cornell University where he worked on plant development. We are happy he has turned to the fruit fly for his next system.