Welcome Clint Ko
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.
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 Frank on publishing his work “LRhoA GTPase Inhibition Organizes Contraction During Epithelial Morphogenesis” in The Journal of Cell Biology! Frank showed how inhibiting RhoA can promote contraction during tissue folding. And read the Spotlight article on our paper, written by Alpha Yap. Also, congratulations on your new position as a Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University!
Congratulations to Dr. Hannah Yevick for being awarded a prestigious NIH 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.
Several members of the Martin lab – Juana De la O, Anthony Mc Dougal, and Mingmar Sherpa – will be attending the 13th annual International Conference on Neural Tube Defects at the University of British Columbia from August 11th – 14th. Juana and Anthony will be giving talks on their research, while Mingmar will be presenting a poster. Please come by and say hello!
Jennifer Chu reports on Anthony McDougal’s doctoral thesis, studying butterfly wing scale morphogenesis in Vanessa cardui.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/new-findings-first-moments-butterfly-scale-formation-0626
Original publication here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8670486/
Congratulations to graduate student, Marlis Denk-Lobnig, who was featured in the MIT Biology department news. Read the article.