Welcome Anthony McDouglal!

Congratulations to graduate student, Jonathan Coravos, on passing his qualifying exam.

Congratulations to graduate student, Natalie Heer, for publishing her review article “Tension, Contraction and Tissue Morphogenesis” in Development. Natalie contributed to the special issue celebrating the 100th anniversary of “On Growth and Form.” Her review article describes the latest research explaining how forces are generated to sculpt tissues.

Congratulations Dr. Jackson on defending your PhD and getting a postdoc position in Germany.  Best of luck.

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.

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 to Jaci Camuglia and Anna Yeh on passing their Ph.D. candidacy exams! Excited to see what research directions we go in over the next few years.