Plenary-08 : Arthur Winfree Prize

Leah Edelstein-Keshet

Professor of Mathematics

University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract:

In the 1970's, 80's and 90's, Art Winfree and many of his contemporaries analyzed intriguing spiral waves in several kinds of excitable systems, including chemical reactions, aggregation patterns of social amoebae, and electrical activity in cardiac tissue. Meanwhile, biological imaging methods developed to the point that high resolution images reveals spiral waves of activity of proteins inside cells. In this talk, I will survey some of the cell-migration models developed in my group, with emphasis on the way that intracellular signaling regulates cell polarity, cell shape, and cell motility of eukaryotic cells. While core polarity regulation can be explained by the biology of specific central regulatory proteins (small GTPases), that regulatory circuit is tuned by feedback from other proteins, from the cell's environment (extracellular matrix), and from chemical or mechanical stimuli. I will describe our recent interest in spiral waves of protein activity and the influence of such waves on the migration patterns of invasive melanoma cells.

Session video recording