Nikhila's bioRxiv paper is up!

Check out Nikhila’s paper titled “Rab11 endosomes coordinate centrosome number and movement following mitotic exit” here. Its got cool new stuff linking endosomes with centrosomes during the last stage of cell division, the cleavage of the cytokinetic bridge. This was done in collaboration with the Patteson lab.

Model depicting centrosomes (green) containing Rab11-endosomes (orange) reorienting towards the cytokinetic bridge with associated middy (purple) during pre-abscission.

Congrats to Jules and Castaneda Lab!

Congrats to Julia Riley, Amber K. Rusnock, and the Castaneda Lab, along with Hehnly lab member Peter Fioramonti on the recently accepted manuscript! Check it out here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jnc.15453. It’s titled “ALS-linked mutations impair UBQLN2 stress-induced bimolecular condensate assembly in cells”. I even helped out with some image processing (see below)!

Congrats to Nicole Hall on her write-up about Sub-Distal Appendages!

Check out a fun write-up by Hehnly Lab undergraduate turned post-bac, Nicole Hall, about a substructure of the centrosome, sub-distal appendages contribution to cell division, ciliogenesis, and differentiation. Also importantly, Nicole is on the look out for sweet graduate programs, she is the catch of the decade for any lab who wants an excited, curious, and driven graduate student. Keep your eyes peeled for great things in the future from Nicole!

The title of her paper is: A centriole’s Subdistal appendages: contributions to cell division, ciliogenesis and differentiation

You can find it here.

Appendage proteins result in cilia defects and/or spindle positioning defects with downstream consequences in development.

New Methods Paper from Hehnly Lab to Check out!

Check out Abbi, Amra, and Thomas’s methods paper “Imaging the early zebrafish embryo centrosomes… to understand spindle formation.” If you love spindles, you’ll love looking at them in the zebrafish embryo! Big, dynamic, and of course PRETTY! This method’s paper was based on our recently graduate PhD student, Lindsay Rathbun and our current PhD candidate, Abbi, studies on centrosome dynamics in the early embryo using zebrafish and C. elegans.

During the earliest division stages, zebrafish embryos have large cells that divide rapidly and synchronously to create a cellular layer on top of the yolk. In this study we describe a protocol for monitoring spindle dynamics during these early embryonic divisions. We outline techniques for injecting zebrafish embryos with small-molecule inhibitors toward polo-like kinases, preparing and mounting embryos for three-dimensional imaging using confocal microscopy. These techniques are used to understand how the early zebrafish embryo’s centrosome constructs the mitotic spindle.