Fernando Melara Barahona presents poster for MSRP 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.

Jonathan Coravos gave an amazing seminar and successfully defended his thesis. Well done Jonathan! Have fun in Chile!

Congratulations Jeanne Jodoin for publishing her work “Abl Suppresses Cell Extrusion and Intercalation During Epithelium Folding” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Jeanne showed how the Abelson tyrosine kinase suppresses an EMT-like cell extrusion during tissue folding.

Congratulations Mimi Xie for publishing her work “Loss of Gα12/13 Exacerbates Apical Area-dependence of Actomyosin Contractility” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Mimi showed how apical actin density can depend on apex size. Suppressing this dependence is important to coordinate contractility across a tissue.

Anthony is the newest postdoc in the lab. Anthony comes to us from the MIT Mechanical Engineering PHD program.