Welcome Yujie Li

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, Jonathan Jackson, on passing his qualifying exam.

Congratulations Elena Kingston on winning the best poster prize at the Building 68 retreat. We have won a poster prize each year for the past 3 years. Nice job Mimi, Claudia, and now Elena.

Congratulations to Hannah Yevick and Clint Ko on submitting their papers. You can read Hannah’s paper titled Structural redundancy in supracellular actomyosin networks enables robust tissue folding, and Clint’s paper titled Microtubules stabilize intercellular contractile force transmission during tissue folding on BioRxiv.

Congratulations postdoc Jasmin Imran Alsous and grad student Jonathan Jackson on publishing their paper titlec Dynamics of hydraulic and contractile wave-mediated fluid transport during Drosophila oogenesis in PNAS.

Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.