Drug Screening On the Fly: Resistance is Futile Center for Developmental Biology

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Category	Seminar
Date and Time	2017-03-13 17:00 - 18:00
Venue	Seminar Room A7F
Speaker	Michele Markstein
Affiliation	University of Massachusetts
Title	Drug Screening On the Fly: Resistance is Futile
Poster	click here to download(PDF)
Host	Yu-Chiun Wang
Summary	The Markstein lab studies how stem cells interpret and respond to natural and synthetic chemicals in the environment. We recently showed that stem cells proliferate into small masses in response to a subset of chemotherapeutics currently in use in patients, highlighting the clinical importance of understanding the basic biology of how stem cells respond to their chemical environment. This result also demonstrates that stem cells in flies, like in mammals, are largely drug resistant. Our goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying stem cell chemical interactions, in both normal and tumor stem cells. We do all of our work in vivo, using the intestine of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model. The fly intestine is a simplified version of our own, with many fewer cells, that nonetheless is composed of similar cell types: multipotent stem cells, absorptive enterocytes, and secretory enteroendocrine cells. We employ chemical and genetic screening, tumor modeling, transgenics, efflux assays, and confocal microscopy.