Event Date
MIC (Microbiology Course) 291: Selected Topics in Microbiology
Work-in-Progress Seminars
Guest Speaker: Assistant Professor Shane G. McInally, Ph.D, Biology and Biotechnology, Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Dr. McInally presents: "Length Control is an Emergent Property of Actin Cable Bundles"
About the speaker: Shane McInally is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and Biotechnology. His research focuses on understanding the molecular and physical mechanisms that cells use to control and scale the size of their internal structures with distinct aspects of their geometry. He received a BS from the University of California, Riverside, an MPH from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from the University of California, Davis. Most recently he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biology and Physics Departments at Brandeis University.
About the seminar: The sizes of many subcellular structures are coordinated with cell size to ensure that these structures meet the functional demands of the cell. Until now, our understanding of how cells control the size of their subcellular structures has relied upon mechanisms that confer size-dependent feedback on the rate at which molecular building blocks are either added or removed from that structure. Here, we present and experimentally test a new mathematical model of actin cable length control that explores how the specific geometry and architecture of a cable can encode length control. This model is a significant departure from previous length control models, because there is no length-dependent molecular feedback mechanism that tunes the rates of assembly or disassembly. Instead, the control over actin cable length naturally emerges from the geometric arrangement of the filaments within this higher order cytoskeletal network. We use this model to further dissect the mechanisms that allow actin cables to grow longer in larger cells, and identify specific assembly factors that enable cells to scale cable length with cell length. This work reveals a new strategy that cells use to coordinate the size of their internal parts with their linear dimensions. We suspect that similar design principles may control the size and scaling of other subcellular structures whose physiologically important dimension is their length.
Contact Scott Dawson (scdawson@ucdavis.edu) or Amanda Huang (amnhuang@ucdavis.edu) for any questions.