View source for How the sea urchin embryo gets its cleavage furrows (in the right place)

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'''How the sea urchin embryo gets its cleavage furrows (in the right place)''', a lecture in two parts

[http://celldynamics.org/celldynamics/people/odell/index.html Garrett M. Odell] and [http://www.celldynamics.org/celldynamics/people/foe/index.html Victoria E. Foe]

University of Washington

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When animal cells divide, they assemble a transient, single-use, ring-shaped muscle called the 'contractile ring' so that, when it contracts, it cleaves the parent cell into two daughter cells.  Only if the resulting cleavage plane is oriented just right does each daughter cell inherit identical sets of chromosomes and other essential bits.  In this talk, Victoria Foe and Garrett Odell give their new solution to the long-standing mystery of how cells 'know' where and when to position their contractile rings.  This involves a dynamic self-assembling cooperation of amazing cell biological machinery, including tens of thousands of single-molecule motors running along thousands of microtubules.  The talk comprises a sequence of pictures and movies (of real cell micrographs and computer simulations) that border on art, plus a scientific narration explaining the biological mystery and how the proposed solution solves it.

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'''Garrett Odell''' received both undergraduate and PhD degrees in theoretical mechanics at The Johns Hopkins University. He was then professor of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford University, and a Miller Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1986, he has been Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, where he is Director of the Center for Cell Dynamics at Friday Harbor Laboratory.

His current research interests are in cell biology and developmental biology and in the use of agent-based computer modeling of cytoskeletal dynamics involving hundreds of thousands of cytoskeletal parts, each governed by a small system of differential equations, and each free to move anywhere in the 3-D cell and interact with whatever it hits. From these autonomous interactions, apparently purposeful, dynamic cell level actions emerge. The most interesting, and biologically relevant feature of these emergent actions is how astonishingly robust they can be to large changes in cell size, numbers of molecules, and biochemical rate constants.

'''Victoria Foe''' received undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, and studied as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and the University of California at San Francisco.   She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow.   She is currently a Research Professor of Biology working at the University of Washington’s Center for Cell Dynamics at Friday Harbor Laboratories.
 
Her work, which has always had a highly visual component, has focused on understanding various aspects of how embryonic cells coordinate differentiation with the cell division cycle.