Congratulations to graduate student, Clint Ko, on publishing his research titled Microtubules promote intercellular contractile force transmission during tissue folding in the Journal of Cell Biology. Clint discovered that microtubules maintain intercellular adhesion by regulating actin.
Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.
Juana De La O comes to us from the University of Chicago and the MIT Biology PhD program.
Mimi Xie successfully defended her thesis. She gave an excellent seminar to our community. Nice job Mimi!
Congratulations to graduate student, Mimi Xie, on passing her qualifying exam.
Mingmar joined us this summer from the University of Alabama at Birmingham as our new Technical Associate, welcome!
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.
