CDBFaculty of the Division of Cell & Developmental Biology (CDB) pursue research aimed at detailed understanding of: the structure and function of cellular components, such as membranes, organelles, chromosomes and the cytoskeleton; cellular processes, such as epithelial transport, cell motility, mitosis, protein targeting and secretion, stem cell plasticity, and eukaryotic cell cycle control; tumor biology; cellular physiology; the origin of cell polarity; and the molecular and cellular basis for axis formation, morphogenetic movements, fate determination, and gene regulation during embryogenesis and cellular differentiation. These issues are being addressed in systems as diverse as yeast, fruit flies, worms, sea urchins, frogs, mice and mammalian cells in culture, and these studies exploit techniques ranging from molecular biology and microinjection to digital imaging and mathematical modeling. Specialized equipment for confocal fluorescence microscopy, video imaging, and computer simulations are available in shared core facilities in the Life Sciences Addition where many of the faculty are housed.

A selection of papers published by MCB graduate students in CDB labs:

Bosch JA, Tran NH, Hariharan IK. (2015) CoinFLP: a system for efficient mosaic screening and for visualizing clonal boundaries in Drosophila. Development (Cambridge, England). 142(3):597-606.

Bunker BD, Nellimoottil TT, Boileau RM, Classen AK, Bilder D. (2015) The transcriptional response to tumorigenic polarity loss in Drosophila. eLife. 4.

Chiba K, Hockemeyer D. (2015) Genome editing in human pluripotent stem cells using site-specific nucleases. Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.). 1239:267-80.

Chiba K, Johnson JZ, Vogan JM, Wagner T, Boyle JM, et al. (2015) Cancer-associated TERT promoter mutations abrogate telomerase silencing. eLife. 4.

Johnson JZ, Hockemeyer D. (2015) Human stem cell-based disease modeling: prospects and challenges. Current opinion in cell biology. 37:84-90.

Krefman NI, Drubin DG. (2015) Control of the spindle checkpoint by lateral kinetochore attachment and limited Mad1 recruitment. Mol Biol Cell. 26(14):2620-39.

Miller KE, Heald R. (2015) Glutamylation of Nap1 modulates histone H1 dynamics and chromosome condensation in Xenopus. The Journal of cell biology. 209(2):211-20.

Morita T, McClain SP, Batia LM, Pellegrino M, Wilson SR, et al. (2015) HTR7 Mediates Serotonergic Acute and Chronic Itch. Neuron. 87(1):124-38.

Walsh CM, Bautista D, Lumpkin EA. (2015) Mammalian touch catches up. Current opinion in neurobiology. 34:133-9.