Graduate student Clint Ko and Undergraduate Prateek Kalakuntla publish MBoC paper on how mitotic entry can repress ‘active’ contractility and result in relaxation that promotes neighboring tissue folding.
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.
Babli is doing summer research as part of the prestigious Khorana Scholars Program.
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 Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.
Congratulations Jeanne Jodin, for publishing her work “Stable Force Balance between Epithelial Cells Arises from F-Actin Turnover” in Developmental Cell. Jeanne showed that stable force balance between cells in a tissue requires robust actin filament turnover. The paper was also highlighted by the journal. Read the paper and the highlight article.
Congratulations to Jaci Camuglia and Anna Yeh on passing their Ph.D. candidacy exams! Excited to see what research directions we go in over the next few years.
