Bing He
Dartmouth College, NH·Biology
Embryos build organs largely by bending flat sheets of cells into new shapes. Folding a sheet of cells is both a genetic process and a physical one: genes tell cells when to pull, but whether the tissue actually folds depends on how stiff, soft or well-connected it is.
- Fields
Biology
Biophysics
Genetics
- Topics
epithelial folding
morphogenesis
gastrulation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Determine how Rab11-mediated vesicle trafficking feeds back to reinforce the supracellular actomyosin network, the contractile actin-and-myosin meshwork spanning many cells, during apical constriction in Drosophila mesoderm precursors.
- Test how PI 4-kinases and their lipid product PI4P control force-induced expansion of the cell surface, and whether a cell's surface "expandability" sets the local and global mechanical properties of the tissue.
- Determine how compressive forces are generated in the ectoderm surrounding the mesoderm, and how they promote mechanical bistability and long-range coordination during ventral furrow formation.
- Combine optogenetics, which uses light to control proteins in chosen cells, with quantitative live imaging to measure how tissue tension and mechanical coupling between mesoderm and ectoderm change as the embryo folds.
More about the research
Much is known about how cells generate pulling forces, and much less about how a tissue's mechanical properties are set and how that shapes development. This work asks how tissues produce, sense and respond to forces during folding, using gastrulation in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model.
Why it matters
Folding epithelial sheets is how embryos build multilayered tissues and organs, and failures in this process cause embryonic death and congenital birth defects. Defining the molecular and mechanical rules of folding in the fruit fly could clarify how such defects arise and how cells combine developmental signals with physical forces to build organ structures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Sokac
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Biology
Test whether measurable features of transcription of five actin-regulator genes explain the even, synchronized timing of cellularization in Drosophila embryos, using live imaging of mRNAs down to single molecules.
Jyoti Misra
Stony Brook University, NY·Genetics
Test how the endocytic machinery that internalizes surface proteins, together with a competitive inhibitor, establishes and maintains the spatial organization of Dachsous–Fat signaling across Drosophila tissues.
Kenneth Irvine
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Biology
Determine how phase-separated condensates of Warts with Jub, and Jub-promoted phosphorylation of the Warts N-terminus, inhibit this Hippo pathway kinase in Drosophila tissues.
The school
Dartmouth College: 16 labs on PI Pages, $418M a year on research, 104 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.