The Hehnly Lab’s 1st preprint, led by Lindsay Rathbun with the help of many people including our graduate student Abrar Aljiboury and postbac Julie Manikas, along with Josh Bembenek’s laboratory (University of Michigan with X Bai from the NIH) and Jeff Amack’s laboratory (UPSTATE Medical School, Syracuse NY). We found some crazy large centrosomes in extremely large zebrafish embryo cells that scale with changes in cell size! We didn’t leave out C. elegans either. Check it out here:
The Hehnly Lab is super excited to get another 3 years of funding from the DOD on the project entitled: “Cenexin and Plk1: A sensor for Chromosome Alignment”. This project would have never gotten off the ground without the awesome studies by my talented graduate student Erica Colicino with contributions from many lab members (Mike Bates, Katrina Stevens, Alice Garrastegui, Erin Curtis, Lindsay Rathbun, Julie Manikas…) Check out the papers here:
Also we had a really great collaboration with Dr. John Scott’s group, specifically his student Paula Bucko who worked with my graduate student Lindsay Rathbun to incorporate a chemical genetics system to inhibit PLK1 at centrosomes in zebrafish embryos. This study provides a great rationale for our current proposed studies to explore the role of PLK1 at centrosomes, specifically at mother centriole appendages, during cell division and its contribution to chromosome instability. Check out the collaborative study here:
Paula Bucko, a graduate student in John Scott (Pharmacology, UW), recently published an exciting study titled “Subcellular drug targeting illuminates local kinase action.” We (primarily Lindsay Rathbun, Hehnly lab graduate student and myself) were super excited to help Paula and John out with doing the zebrafish/in vivo studies featured in the paper that shows a novel chemical genetic approach to spatially and temporally inhibit the mitotic kinase PLK1.
You can read the study here and a cool digest here.
zebrafish expressing the SNAP-PACT (magenta) for centrosomal targetted PLK1 inhibition during zebrafish embryonic development.
Check out Erica’s recent publication in Cytoskeleton titled “Regulating a key mitotic regulator, polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1)”. You can find the article here. Here’s her beautiful cover below, which is a Structured Illumination Microscopy Micrograph of PLK1 (Fire Look-up Table) and kinetochores (CREST, white) during different stages of the cell cycle.
