What are you working on?

Author for this post: Travis Parsons, Ph.D Candidate

Over time, projects within a laboratory evolve as the questions a lab is interested in change. To get a nice perspective on what the Raftery lab has been researching for the past few years, check out our research page here.

This post will hopefully give a more generalized view of what we are interested in. During your life span, your cells are constantly communicating to one another and rearranging themselves. Many people tend to think of two things when they hear that cells can move/migrate. One is that this is clearly very important during development, where you transition from being a single cell into an organism with trillions of cells. The other is that when cancerous cells move (termed ‘metastasis’), it can be deadly. What most people forget to appreciate, however, is that cells move all the time, throughout your entire lifespan. Cells reorganize when you heal from a wound. Neurons move to remodel your brain as you learn information. During angiogenesis (the creation of new blood vessels), cells are moving to create new tissues. As a result, cellular movements are critical for development, normal maintenance of your body, and in disease.

The next idea to appreciate is that cells don’t just move on a whim. Think about how compartmentalized your body is. Your digestive system prevents any food or digested matter from going where it isn’t supposed to. Your circulatory system keeps blood where it is needed and not elsewhere in your body cavity. Your brain is protected by a blood-brain barrier that keeps unwanted infections and molecules out. Your skin keeps everything contained within you. This is achieved by cells that work together very coordinately. If even a couple cells failed to do so, the results would be disastrous: Internal bleeding, septic shock, infection, and more. For this reason, cells aren’t just inanimate objects. They communicate with one another all the time – sometimes hundreds of times per second. They send messages via chemicals, proteins, electrical currents, and possibly much more we haven’t discovered yet. These messages between cells tell them if they should move, when, how often, where to, when to start, when to stop, and much, much more.

So what is it that we are interested in? We wish to know how cells are communicating information about their movements to one another. If we can understand what signals tell cells to migrate, we can begin to understand many of the things we introduced above (how development proceeds, how to prevent cancer metastasis, how to enhance wound healing, and more). Many labs are looking to answer these questions by using human cell lines (cells that are derived from humans) but we are taking a different approach wherein we try to understand them in the context of entire tissues (for example, rather than study kidney cells by themselves, study the entire kidney as a tissue). To do this, we are using the ovary of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster (Why are we using a fruit fly? See our last post). We are able to dissect the ovary out of the fruit fly, and then culture it artificially for hours at a time. During this time it develops normally, despite being outside of the body of the fruit fly, and we can observe how the cells rearrange and reorient themselves within the context of an entire tissue. By using the awesome power of Drosophila genetics, we can proceed to genetically manipulate any part of their genome (in particular, genes that play a role in signaling cells to move) and observe the resulting defects that occur. By using this approach, we will be able to genetically dissect what genes are responsible for producing the signals that govern cellular movement. Over time, our lab as well as others will begin piecing together the signaling network that cells use to migrate, and how or why these signals go wrong during disease.

Hopefully this post provides a brief insight into what our lab is working on. More posts to follow soon!