Engineering Cellular Behavior: The Polarity Machinery of Chemotactic Cells Center for Developmental Biology

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Category	Seminar
Date and Time	2007-11-20 16:00 - 17:00
Venue	Auditorium C1F
Speaker	Takanari Inoue
Affiliation	Stanford University
Title	Engineering Cellular Behavior: The Polarity Machinery of Chemotactic Cells
Poster	click here to download(PDF)
Host	Hiroki Ueda
Summary	Cell migration has been intensely investigated due to its involvement in a number of physiological events including angiogenesis, immunity, wound healing, and the establishment of neuronal networks. While the molecular mechanisms underlying cell migration are becoming clearer, investigations are limited without tools for temporally manipulating protein activity and second messenger levels in living cells. I have previously introduced an inducible heterodimerization strategy to control GTPase activity on the second timescale. As an extension of this technique, I have recently developed a system for the in situ manipulation of phosphoinositides, critical regulators of cell migration. In this study I apply both the GTPase and phosphoinositide inducible systems to quantitatively probe the polarity machinery of chemotactic cells in order to address a fundamental question in cell migration: how do cells sense a small gradient of external cues and convert it into morphological polarization?