Skip to main content

Lab News

What’s happening in the Macara Lab

December 2023 – ASCB in Boston; and Lab Christmas party
http://lab.vanderbilt.edu/macara-lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2024/01/Christian_ASCB.jpg

August 2023 – Brunch for the lab at Adele’s restaurant on Sunday morning, kindly hosted by Jason’s parents – Jason is leaving for MIT as an undergrad next week.  We will all miss his passion for science!

July 2023 – Alex’s paper is now published –  And we got the cover image!  And a Preview article about the paper!!

May 2023 – Alex has graduated and moved on to Weill Cornell Medical College in NYC for a postdoc with Tobias Meyer.

April 2023 – Great news!! Alex’s paper on epithelial cell intercalation has been accepted for publication by Developmental Cell.  

February 2023 – More awesome news! last year a high school student, Jason Wang, joined our lab and began a project to uncover the mechanism of E-cadherin internalization triggered by Ras signaling.  This spring he was honored as a finalist in the Regeneron Science competition – he was flown to DC for the ceremony and a banquet, met Ron Vale, and visited Janelia Farms!  Congrats to Jason!!!

March 2022 –   Loic Fort’s paper on an apoptotic signaling requirement for stem cell conversion to the cardiac lineage has been accepted for publication by Nature Cell Biology!

January 2022:  Postdoc Lindsey Seldin has been appointed to the faculty of Emory University as an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology.  She is busy shipping mice and human tissue samples from Vanderbilt and will be starting her new lab February 1.  She has a new VA grant that will support her research.

August 2021:  Armelle has a new preprint on BioRxv “A Self-Limiting Circuit Regulates Mammary Cap Cell Plasticity through TGF-beta Signaling”.  Very cool story!  Also, Armelle is soon leaving to begin a new job in medical data analysis.

December 2020:  Maria has successfully defended her dissertation and is now Dr. Fomicheva!  Congrats to Maria, not only for a great talk but also for dancing afterwards under the lab safety shower! CHECK OUT THE MOVIE (click on the link above).

November 2020:  Congratulations to Lindsey Seldin and Maria Fomicheva!! – Lindsey’s paper on dermal fibroblast inflammasome activation was just published in Developmental Cell (with a Preview and the journal cover image!) and Maria’s work on a genome-wide CRISPR screen for genes regulating epithelial homeostasis was published in eLife.  Two beautiful papers!!!  AND we got the cover of Dev Cell (December issue).

July 2020 Check out Ian’s recent paintings at –  https://sites.google.com/view/ian-macara-paintings/home

June 2020:  Mukhtar and Christian are co-authors with our Australian geneticist collaborators on a paper published in  J. Exp. Med. on the characterization of vesicle transport in cells from two patients with mutations in the EXOC2 subunit of the exocyst.

June 2020: Lab members join a Saturday morning protest against racial and social injustice.

October 2019 – Ian was selected as a Fellow of ASCB

July 2019:  Welcome to Paola Molina, who has joined the lab as a new postdoc.  She is working on epithelial homeostasis and cell extrusion.

December 2018: Mukhtar’s paper on exocyst dynamics was published in Nature Communications, December 3Mei and Guo wrote a nice commentary on it in Current Biology (R922, 2019).

July 2018:  Alex and Heather’s paper on the novel SAN1 nuclease was published by Nature Communications July 3.  Congratulations guys – its a beautiful paper!!