10:30–11:30 am
Please Join us:
John Devany's PhD Thesis Defense
Thursday, November 3,2022 at 10:30 AM CDT
INTERPLAY BETWEEN CELL PROLIFERATION AND COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR IN EPITHELIA
Collections of epithelial cells form macroscopic materials that show collective behavior, including deformation, self-organization, and cell turnover. However, the complex cell-cell interactions which drive this collective behavior are not well understood. Therefore, we performed studies which aim to connect molecular pathways regulating the cytoskeleton and cell proliferation to cell-cell interactions and collective cell behavior. By characterizing tissue scale behaviors, we were able to develop and constrain new models which explain the collective behavior in epithelia. We demonstrate that collective motion and self-organization in epithelia is driven in significant part by cell cycle-dependent changes in cell-cell interactions. Conversely, we show that the cell cycle is regulated by collective behavior at the tissue scale through a process called contact inhibition of proliferation. We present a framework for contact inhibition which explains how cell proliferation is regulated by spatial constraints which we then test experimentally. These observations demonstrate that there is feedback between proliferative and collective cell behaviors in the epithelium that may control a transition between tissue morphogenesis and homeostasis. Together, the data we present help elucidate several general phenomena of epithelial tissues observed across diverse tissue types and relevant to understand both normal tissue function and disease.
Committee Members:
Margaret Gardel (Chair)
Vincenzo Vitelli
David Schmitz
Edwin Munro
John will be a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern working with Jaehyuk Choi on immunology and skin cancer.
Putri Kusumo
Assistant Director of Graduate Affairs
Department of Physics
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