November 30, 2023
Adam Martin to present Division of Biology Seminar
Submitted by Division of Biology
Adam Martin, professor and undergraduate officer in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present "Tissue Folding Across Length Scales: Cell Based Origami" as part of the Division of Biology Seminar Series at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 4, in 221 Ackert Hall.
During embryonic development, an organism's one-dimensional genome sequence encodes the program that miraculously determines its shape and those of its organs. Much like the art of origami, a ubiquitous mode of changing the shape of tissue sheets is for cells to induce tissue folding. Tissue folding can form tubes and pits in tissues and involves forces generated by cell collectives that are precisely patterned and transmitted across sheets of cells to change their form. In animal cells, gene expression and cell signaling circuits control these patterns; influencing cell shape change, cell-cell adhesion and division to sculpt tissues. The coordination of these biological processes to create shape in an amorphous tissue is one of the most amazing feats in biology.
What is particularly fascinating is that this process is not hardwired, but that cells are influenced by mechanics and geometry resulting in emergent behaviors that still robustly sculpt tissues. Discovering how the emergent behaviors of thousands of cells interface with gene expression and intercellular signaling represents one of the frontiers of developmental biology research — imagine if when doing origami there was variable resistance to moving the edges of the paper and that this changed over time.
Martin's lab uses tissue folding as a model to understand the genesis of tissue shape. The lab's prior and current work has focused on: discovering mechanisms that promote intercellular force transmission and determining its impact on cell behavior; defining how cell biological processes are tuned by signaling circuits and gene expression, and the impact of signal circuitry on tissue shape; and identifying principles by which force influences cells and its role in collective cell behaviors.
If you would like to visit with Martin, please contact Jocelyn McDonald at jmcdona@k-state.edu. Further information regarding Martin's work can be found on his website.