Jeanne Jodoin awarded NIH F32 Fellowship

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.

Postdoctoral fellow, Hannah Yevick, published her research titled Structural redundancy in supracellular actomyosin networks enables robust tissue folding in Developmental Cell. You can hear her talk about what she discovered in the video produced by Raleigh McElvery of the MIT Biology department. Read an MIT News article on the research.

Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.

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 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 to Soline on publishing her work “Myosin 2-Induced Mitotic Rounding Enables Columnar Epithelial Cells to Interpret Cortical Spindle Positioning Cues” in Current Biology. Soline showed how mitotic cell rounding is critical to orient cell division such that both daughter cells remain in the tissue.