Welcome Mingmar Sherpa!

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

Adam Martin has been promoted to Associate Professor, effective July 1, 2016.

Congratulations to summer student, Fernando Melara Barahon, for winning a presentation award at ABRCMS 2022 conference.

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 Natalie on publishing her work “Actomyosin-based Tissue Folding Requires a Multicellular Myosin Gradient” in Development. Natalie discovered that a tissue-wide gradient in transcription and resulting contractility is necessary to fold a tissue. We had fun collaborating with Pearson Miller and the Dunkel Lab on this project.

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.