Speakers: Jocelyn McDonald, PhD

Jocelyn McDonald, PhD

Professor, Division of Biology
Kansas State University

 

Jocelyn McDonald is a professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University, where she studies how cell collectives migrate within three-dimensional tissues. She received her B.S. in biochemistry from Marquette University and studied developmental neurobiology for her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She performed postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she began working on cell migration. Prior to joining Kansas State University in 2015, she was an assistant staff (assistant professor equivalent) at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. Her lab uses a combination of Drosophila genetics, live imaging, cell biology, and molecular biology techniques to discover conserved regulators of collective cell migration in development and disease.

 

Measuring Dynamic Cellular Behaviors in Three-Dimensional Tissues

Cells often display very dynamic behaviors. This is especially true during embryonic development, where cells can move in small to large collectives to sculpt and shape tissues and organs. Collective cell movement also contributes to wound healing and tumor metastasis in cancer. A major goal is to understand how, when, and why cells move collectively inside three-dimensional tissues. I will discuss how we use live cell imaging to measure dynamic cellular behaviors of a migrating cell collective in Drosophila, the border cells. This system presents both opportunities and challenges for visualizing cell migration at all scales, from organelles to individual cells, to the collective and tissue levels. Live and fixed cell imaging is paired with quantifications that allow us to better determine the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern collective cell migration.