王成禾 (Chen-Ho Wang)

年級身份： 
PhD student

所屬的學校或研究單位： 
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)

研究領域： 
Cell polarity, Spatiotemporal modeling in biology, Reaction-diffusion system, Cell-cell adhesion

簡述研究興趣： 

Cell polarization is an essential process that is key to morphology and function of tissues. Cells in tissue polarize and align their polarization axis to create functional, tissue specific architecture. A prominent example is the organization of epithelial tissues. Here, single cells polarize into three distinct cell membrane domains: apical (free surface), lateral (cell-cell contact) and basal (cell-matrix contact). Adhesion contacts of cell-cell versus cell-matrix interface are the most obvious external cues to align polarization axis of single cells such that apical domains are forming a single closed surface or cavity. Much is still unknown about the role of cell-cell contact interface with its homophilic adhesion receptors. Even less is known about the feedback and interplay of basal and lateral domains and how this is connected to apical-basal polarization of epithelial cells.

In this research, we induce and image cell adhesion patterns on defined 2D surfaces. In addition to experiments, we establish a non-equilibrium reaction-diffusion simulation framework that couples cell adhesion to cortex remodeling and reproduces the experimental observations in order to test whether they are sufficient to explain polarity.