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/
Graduate student, Jaclyn Camuglia, submitted her research “Morphogenetic forces planar polarize LGN/Pins in the embryonic head during Drosophila gastrulation” and posted a preprint. We found that morphogenetic forces are required to orient cell divisions in the Drosophila embryo through a mechanism that establishes polarity of the Pins protein.
Anthony is the newest postdoc in the lab. Anthony comes to us from the MIT Mechanical Engineering PHD program.
Congratulations to Jeanne Jodoin, who was awarded a prestigious NIH F32 postdoctoral fellowship.
Jeanne comes to us from Vanderbilt University where she received a Ph.D. for her work on the mechanisms of dynein motor localization.
Graduate student Clint Ko and Undergraduate Prateek Kalakuntla publish MBoC paper on how mitotic entry can repress ‘active’ contractility and result in relaxation that promotes neighboring tissue folding.
Congratulations Mimi Xie for publishing her work “Loss of Gα12/13 Exacerbates Apical Area-dependence of Actomyosin Contractility” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Mimi showed how apical actin density can depend on apex size. Suppressing this dependence is important to coordinate contractility across a tissue.
