Department of Cell and Developmental Biology
Cell and Development Biology: March seminar series
Mar. 6, 2019—Monday’s weekly seminars are on a cutting-edge topics in cell or developmental biology, as well as stem cell and epithelial biology.
New target for chronic kidney disease
Jan. 31, 2019—Craig Brooks and colleagues have identified a mechanism of kidney fibrosis progression, suggesting a potential new angle for treating chronic kidney disease.
Building a pancreas
Jan. 17, 2019—Ken Lau and Guoqiang Gu have identified a critical biomarker in determining how a pancreatic progenitor cell will develop.
Breast cancer-killing RIG
Dec. 19, 2018—New research led by Rebecca Cook demonstrates that an antiviral receptor called RIG-I has potent immunogenic and therapeutic effects in breast cancer.
The exocyst dynamo
Dec. 14, 2018—Mukhtar Ahmed and colleagues say the methods they employed to understand the mechanisms by which exocysts--protein complexes essential to life--function have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of cell dynamics.
Analyzing single-cell landscapes
Nov. 30, 2018—Qi Liu, PhD, Ken Lau, PhD, and colleagues have developed a new tool, sc-UniFrac, to quantify diverse cell types in single-cell studies.
Novel genetic study sheds new light on risk of heart attack
Oct. 11, 2018—Loss of a protein that regulates mitochondrial function can greatly increase the risk of a heart attack, report Eric Gamazon, Sandra Zinkel and graduate students Christie Salisbury-Ruf and Clinton Bertram in new research.
Cancer Moonshot award to help map tumor progression
Sep. 27, 2018—A trans-institutional team of researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University has received an $11 million Cancer Moonshot grant to build a single-cell resolution atlas to map out the routes that benign colonic polyps take to progress to colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer among both men and women in the United States.
How microvilli form
Sep. 21, 2018—Research led by Matthew Tyska gives new insight into the formation of the lining of the gut that helps us absorb nutrients and guard against illness.
Repairs in the basement membrane
Aug. 9, 2018—New research by Andrea Page-McCaw shows that a membrane that wraps around most animal tissues can heal within 24 hours, but does leave a scar.
SMAD4 clue to colon cancer
Jul. 5, 2018—Chronic inflammation is a predisposing condition for colorectal cancer, the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Anna Means, Ph.D., and colleagues have now linked inflammation-driven carcinogenesis in the colon to loss of an important signaling protein called SMAD4.
Looking beyond the ‘magic bullet’ approach to drug discovery
May. 1, 2018—Vanderbilt scientists have developed a new process that can rapidly and inexpensively identify personalized cancer drugs derived from nature.