Fernando Melara Barahona wins presentation award at ABRCMS!

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 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.

Yujie joins us from the University of Chicago where she completed her Ph.D. with David Kovar. For her graduate work, Yujie worked on developing in vitro assays for imaging molecular interactions with actin filaments.

Elena, our new Technical Assistant, graduated from Swarthmore College in May 2014. Elena spent a summer doing research in David Stern’s lab at Janelia Farm.

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 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.