Hannah publishes WIREs Developmental Biology review

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.

Jonathan comes to us from the Harvard Biophysics PhD program and Mary Ann did her PhD on nuclear movement in muscle.

Mimi Xie successfully defended her thesis. She gave an excellent seminar to our community. Nice job Mimi!

Graduate students Anna Yeh and Jaclyn Camuglia publish book chapter on morphogenesis titled Extracellular Tension and Tissue Morphogenesis.

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 Fernando on a productive summer and successfully presenting your poster at the end of summer program. We look forward to seeing what you do in the future!