I am a first year non-traditional graduate student. I have a M.S. and a full career in industry in the USA and in India. I have decided to get my Ph.D. now so I can go back into the world and do bigger things. I am native to Mumbai, India and I love to go visit my family and spend time with friends there. I am settling into the Atit lab and learning a lot every day. It is an energetic place and I am always reading to generate ideas for a project.
My Project
I have joined the #Walking heads team. I am working with a new undergraduate student to investigate how calvarial osteoblasts so faithfully expand to cover our heads during embryonic development. Recent work from our lab and others show that calvarial osteoblasts use CDC42-Wasl-dependent lamellipodia to expand which suggests they are able to migrate. Calvarial osteoblasts also have enriched cytoskeleton actin and are surrounded by fibronectin matrix during this apical expansion. I am going to investigate what kind of morphogenetic movements they use to migrate apically.
How to the calvarial bone primordia expand apically so rapidly. What kind of morphogenetic movements do they employ?