UCSF

I have taken two approaches to study the actin cytoskeleton in Drosophila S2 cells. In the first approach, I employed a high throughput RNAi screen to identify gene-depletions which caused a defect in cell spreading, and developed new algorithms to quantitatively asses these defects in a high throughput manner. In the second approach, I induced S2 cells to transiently polarize and become dynamic with the transfection of the integrin ps2m8 gene. I also showed that these cells form focal-adhesion like structures.