Welcome Natalie Heer
Biology graduate student, Natalie Heer, joins the lab. Natalie received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University where she worked in the Reck-Peterson lab on dynein motility.
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Marlis successfully defended her PhD thesis
Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.
Congratulations Dr. Vasquez
Claudia Vasquez successfully defended her thesis. She gave a stellar seminar to faculty, friends, and colleagues at MIT. Nice job!
Claudia Vasquez publishes eLife paper
Congratulations Claudia on publishing her work “Drosophila Non-muscle Myosin II Motor Activity Determines the Rate of Tissue Folding” in eLife. Claudia demonstrated that myosin 2 motor activity sets the rate of apical constriction and tissue folding, showing that myosin 2 is the motor that drives these processes. This work was the result of a great collaboration with James Sellers’ lab at the National Institutes of Health.
Frank Mason publishes JCB paper
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!
Frank Mason publishes Nature Cell Biology paper
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.
Hannah Yevick and Clint Ko submitted papers
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.