Home Department: undeclared
Mentor: Lauren Goins (Developmental Biology)

“Identifying Proteins That Regulate Asymmetric Cell Division During Hematopoiesis”

A fundamental mechanism by which hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells balance self-renewal with differentiation is via asymmetric cell division (ACD). When this becomes unbalanced, profound blood disorders arise, disrupting normal blood cell distribution and multilineage blood cell development. Abigail’s project will be focusing on screening through candidate ACD proteins with RNAi and immunofluorescence, and monitoring differences in hematopoietic cell types. Abigail will work on understanding the roles of ACD proteins Mira, Lgl, and aPKC in cell fate determination in the hematopoietic progenitor population, specifically using Drosophila to aid in the development of a testable system to study ACD in hematopoiesis.