Welcome Mingmar Sherpa!

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 to Hannah Yevick and Clint Ko on submitting their papers. You can read Hannah’s paper titled Structural redundancy in supracellular actomyosin networks enables robust tissue folding, and Clint’s paper titled Microtubules stabilize intercellular contractile force transmission during tissue folding on BioRxiv.

Congratulations to graduate student, Jonathan Jackson, 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 Jaci on a stellar PhD thesis and tour de force paper. We wish her the best of luck on her next position in industry!