Congratulations Dr. Xie

Babli is doing summer research as part of the prestigious Khorana Scholars Program.

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!

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.

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.

We have a number of new additions to the lab including postdocs Jasmin Imran Alsous and Nat Clarke, graduate students Anna Yeh and Jaclyn Camuglia, undergraduates Prateek Kalakuntla and Jennifer Nwako, and technician Vardges Tserunyan.

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.