April 5, 2022
CSB Professor Shelley Lumba aims to alleviate global hunger by preventing crop loss caused by parasitic plants
Professor Shelley Lumba was recently appointed to the post of Associate Professor in Cell & Systems Biology to pursue her work on the molecular signalling that activates germination in parasitic plants. Her work was profiled in a piece from UofT News titled "Researcher aims to alleviate global…
April 4, 2022
Guzzo lab assesses UV technology to inactivate HIV-1 and hCoV-229E
Prof Christina Guzzo's lab has published a study in Virology Journal looking at UV treatment to inactivate Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the seasonal human coronavirus 229E. Her students Arvin Persaud and Jonathan Burnie published their results as "A UV-LED module that is highly effective at…
January 4, 2022
Cell wall success with two awards for the McFarlane lab at CSPB 2021!
Our colleagues Natalie Hoffmann and Eduardo Ramirez-Rodriquez won awards for their research on cell wall biosynthesis at the annual Canadian Society of Plant Biologists (CSPB) meeting, held virtually on Nov 27, 2021. Congratulations! For plants, we often consider nutrients inside plant cells to be…
December 17, 2021
Tropepe lab reveals reduced photoreceptor integrity underlying Usher Syndrome
Dr Amanda Miles of the Tropepe lab shows that "Usher syndrome type 1-associated gene, pcdh15b, is required for photoreceptor structural integrity in zebrafish" in the Dec 2021 issue of Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM). Zebrafish protocadherin-15b (pcdh15b) is closest in sequence to the human…
November 26, 2021
Plotnikov lab finds key to reducing (cellular) stress is spikes of mDia1
When you’re dancing, running or even walking, fibroblast cells stretch and adapt to all your vigorous movements. What allows these dynamic cells in our bodies to keep their shape and position without being torn apart? Fernando Valencia in Sergey Plotnikov’s lab at Cell & Systems Biology has…
October 19, 2021
What Sits at the Centre of Wound Healing?
The science of rapid wound healing has new insights due to discoveries in fruit flies from the Fernandez-Gonzalez lab at University of Toronto. The results of their collaboration, community and perseverance were published in the journal Cell Reports as “p38-mediated cell growth and survival drive…
September 22, 2021
Sugar-coated cells’ surprise role in gastrulation
The way embryonic cells stick to each other is given a new twist by studies of the sugar coating around developing tissues. The Winklbauer lab has shown that the glycocalyx sugar coat mediates cell-cell attachment across significantly large distances between cells. These surprising results are…
August 27, 2021
Calarco Lab receives Connaught Award to map RNA binding proteins in the nervous system
Professor John Calarco has been granted a Connaught New Researcher Award to publish a detailed atlas of RNA binding proteins (RBPs), key regulators of gene expression, in the nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. Mutations in RBP genes are thought to be associated with diseases including…
August 25, 2021
Push and pull – the forces that earn Sergey Plotnikov a prestigious CIHR grant
Prof Sergey Plotnikov studies how cell movement is guided by the stiffness of the tissue around the cell, and a new CIHR grant will allow his lab to continue pushing this work forward. Each day, cells in our body are continuously bombarded by a myriad of biological signals. As you are comfortably…
August 16, 2021
Hybrid receptor from Lumba lab suggests how parasitic plants evolve
Professor Shelley Lumba’s lab found out how benign plants develop the ability to become parasites on other plants in new research published in PNAS. Many plants release strigolactone hormones to promote beneficial interactions with soil fungi. Parasitic plants like witchweed can sense…