Speakers

Abstract: Multiple environmental cues coordinate to control the behavior of individual cells and their organization into multicellular structures. Uncovering how cells integrate these cues to achieve an organized, functional structure is a fundamental challenge in biology with important biomedical implications in areas, such as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Among the different environmental cues, direct cell-cell interactions play a particularly important role. Cell-cell contacts not only provide physical connections that hold together multicellular structures, but also trigger intracellular biochemical signals. My research group investigates how these signals from direct cell-cell interactions work together with soluble environmental cues to program multicellular patterns and structures. Through mathematical modeling, we have gleaned insights about molecular networks that govern multicellular patterning in the model organism, C. elegans. Our analysis reveals that quantitative perturbations to the molecular network (even without wholesale changes in network architecture) can give rise to significant phenotypic diversity. By comparing our model predictions to large experimental data sets, we can effectively re-trace the quantitative changes that have accrued within the biomolecular network during the natural evolution of C. elegans and several related species. In addition to fundamental insights regarding the evolvability of regulatory networks and multicellular structures, our lab also investigates the role of cell-cell interactions in human epithelial cell systems that are directly related to human health and disease. We are applying quantitative experimental approaches, including automated single-cell imaging, to better understand the (dis)assembly of multicellular epithelial structures. Our results reveal how the interplay between local cell-cell contact and global soluble cues regulates epithelial population growth and aggregation dynamics. I will discuss how our findings advance our current understanding of oncogenesis and development of epithelial tissues and provide potential design strategies for tissue engineering applications. Faculty Host: Niren Murthy, 404.385.5145