Louis Hodgson, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Host: Mingming Wu

New Windows on Living Cells: Spatiotemporal dynamics of Rho GTPases regulate cancer invasion

P21 Rho family small GTPases are critically important in many disease processes including cancer, developmental defects, arthrosclerosis and autoimmune dysfunction. This class of signaling molecules are critical in these diseases by impacting directly: cell polarity, motility and migration through their actions on downstream cytoskeleton/adhesion dynamics; and proliferation by impacting mitogenic and apoptotic signaling pathways. Rho family GTPases regulate these processes by tightly coordinating their activities in response to various environmental cues. Only a very small fraction of GTPases turn on or off at different locations at different times to produce specific effects. However it has been difficult to dissect the spatiotemporal dynamics of signal regulation by conventional imaging or using biochemical techniques. Here, I will introduce several new biosensors specifically targeting different isoforms of Rho GTPases useful for live-cell imaging, based on Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) that we have developed  (or are in the process of development) in our laboratory. I will show examples of how we use these biosensor technologies as well as engineering of sensor designs to achieve optimal expression stability in living cells.

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