Anchoring of the contractile ring
To better understand the mechanisms that anchor the contractile ring to the plasma membrane and generate the tension necessary for furrow ingression, our lab uses a combination of laser ablation, confocal microscopy, and hsFPALM. With this information, we can better understand how changes in physical properties, like drag and velocity, relate to changes in molecular organization of protein proteins.
Probing the structure of chromatin using hsFPALM
With our collaborators, we use a modified CRISPR/Cas9 system to tag loci of interest with photoactivatable fluorescent proteins suitable for hsFPALM to determine the 3D structure of chromatin at different stages in the cell cycle and how this affects downstream regulation of gene expression.
The role of Post-Anaphase Array (PAA) microtubules in cell division
Our lab studies the role PAA microtubules play in cell division. The overall goal for the this project is to determine how the PAA microtubules connect to the contractile ring and to the nuclei and how these connections affect cell division behavior.