Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Follow the Leader: Specialized Cancer Cells Lead Collective Invasion (Ewald Lab)

Research in the Ewald laboratory starts from a simple question: which cells in a breast tumor are the most dangerous to the patient and most responsible for metastatic disease? To answer this question, we developed novel 3D culture assays to...

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Mitochondria in the Brain (Sesaki Lab)

Mitochondria play crucial roles in diverse cellular and physiological processes such as energy production, metabolism, intracellular signaling, cell death, development, and immune response. In these functions, mitochondria serve as a bioenergetic...

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Cells Catch their Breath (Espenshade Lab)

To maintain homeostasis, cells need to measure the concentration of molecules such as nutrients, reactants, and products. Eukaryotic cells, whether single-cell fungi or part of a complex human organ, require environmental oxygen for essential...

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Cells can count (Devreotes Lab)

Biological oscillations are universally found in nature and are critical at many levels of cellular organization. In the model organism we study, the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, starvation-triggered cell-cell aggregation and...

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Molecular Mechanisms of Cellular Mechanosensing (Robinson Lab)

Among the earliest inputs that cells experienced, mechanical stress (forces) guide and direct behavior of cells, including when they are part of tissues, organs, and organ systems. These mechanical stresses are propagated through the cell’s skin...

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Proteins pull together as cells divide (Robinson Lab)

Cytokinesis is a mechanosensitive, fluid dynamical process, and the cytokinesis molecular network is structured like a control system with many feedback loops. The core of this control system is the contractility controller, which has a...

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The Mosquito Salivary Gland:  A Gateway Organ for Parasite Transmission (Andrew Lab)

Infective parasites must traverse the mosquito salivary glands to transmit malaria to humans and other animals. The Andrew Lab is leveraging its findings on the molecules required to form and maintain the Drosophila salivary gland to develop...

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Synthetic Cell Biology: Toward Total Synthesis of Cell Functions (Inoue Lab)

The Inoue Lab develops molecular tools to visualize and re-program cellular processes, and uses these tools to understand complex signaling networks as well as dynamic subcellular entities. In particular, the Inoue Lab has developed...

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It’s MAGIC: Mitochondria take care of the misfolded proteins from cytosol (Li Lab)

Dysfunction of cellular mechanisms maintaining proteostasis leads to accumulation of misfolded proteins and their aggregates, which often results in debilitating human diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases (ND). Interestingly, those...

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Coronaviruses trick the Golgi complex (Machamer lab)

Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses that assemble by budding into the Golgi lumen and then follow the secretory pathway, which is inefficient for such large cargo. These viruses first induce dilation of Golgi cisternae and then modulate the...

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When the young die old (Michaelis Lab)

As human longevity increases, understanding the mechanisms that drive aging becomes ever more critical. We study the premature aging disorder Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome to gain molecular insights into aging, focusing on the nuclear...

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Finding your niche (Matunis Lab)

Many adult tissues are renewed from small populations of stem cells, which continually replace differentiated cells lost to damage or age. Since tissue stem cells are highly dependent on signals from their local microenvironments, or niches...

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