Grant: Operating Grant

During the course of our growth and development many of the cells within our bodies have to migrate to find their place within a growing tissue or organ. Once they arrive at their home destination they must maintain their sense of direction to ensure that they stay in the correct position and point in the right direction for the tissue to function. Often this sense of direction is lost during the formation of a tumor and this allows tumor cells to wander off and invade the surrounding tissue. We study a novel protein called INF1 that we think is important for setting the cell's internal guidance system. This guidance system consists of two separate networks of structural proteins, one called the microfilament cytoskeleton and one called the microtubule network. It has been proposed that microfilaments provide the force that makes the cell move while microtubules point that movement in the right direction. Our initial experiments suggest that INF1 gives the cell its sense of direction by connecting the microfilaments to the microtubules so that they may work together to point the cell in the right direction. We will test this idea by asking how the loss of INF1 function affects the cellular sense of direction and by examining how INF1 is able to connect microfilaments and microtubules to allow the cell to orient itself.