Speaker

Amy Gladfelter is a quantitative cell biologist interested in fundamental mechanisms of cell organization.  She is currently a Distinguished Duke Health Science and Technology Professor in the Cell Biology and Biomedical Engineering Departments at Duke University.  Previously she was Professor of Biology and Associate chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2016-2023 and Assistant and Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth from 2006-2016.  She remains a longstanding fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and is currently the course director of the Physiology Course.   She trained at Princeton University (AB) with Bonnie Bassler, Duke University (Ph.D.) with Danny Lew and UniBasel Biozentrum (post-doc) with Peter Philippsen before starting her independent career at Dartmouth.  She has been honored with the 2014 Graduate Mentoring Award from Dartmouth, the 2015 Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research from the American Society of Cell Biology, the 2020 Graduate school mentoring award from UNC and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.  She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, AAAS, the America Academy of Microbiology and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

Research highlights

In her research program, she use microscopy, biophysical and genetic approaches to study syncytial cells.  Syncytia are cells with many nuclei sharing a common cytoplasm and are found in fungi, throughout the human body such as in muscles and in the placenta as well as in many plants. In her work she examines how these large cells spatially organize the cytoplasm via biomolecular condensates and sense their shape.  Some key contributions include understanding the role of RNA sequence and structure in encoding the properties of condensates and the discovery of septin proteins as micron-scale curvature sensors to link cell geometry to signaling.  She uses biophysical, imaging and mathematical modeling approaches in filamentous fungi and human placenta to learn the biology of these systems and uncover general principles of cell organization.

Her research program began trying to solve a puzzle of cell cycle regulation which was how nuclei can divide out of sync with one another in a common cytoplasm. This suggested some form of local regulation of the cell cycle.  Her group found local control emerges from RNA-based condensates that restrict diffusion of cyclin transcripts and promote nuclear individuality so nuclei can divide independently of neighboring nuclei sharing a cytoplasm.  Since that observation, which was one of the early roles described for condensates, she has been using this system and others to understand how RNA sequences and structures can control the molecular composition, identity and function of condensates.  These studies extended to the RNA condensates in SARS CoV-2, which also induces syncytial cells, and now the enormous syncytiotrophoblast cells of placenta.

In a second area of work, she had studied how the septin cytoskeleton influences the shape of large syncytial cells.  She has implemented new imaging techniques and developed innovative reconstitution assays to study septin filament dynamics on membranes.  She discovered septin filaments sense local cell curvature on the micron scale.  This function is unique to septins amongst eukaryotic proteins and conserved from yeast to humans.  Septins monitor membrane geometry at the base of dendritic spines, the cleavage furrow and cilia, so these studies have broad importance in learning how cell shape controls cell fate.

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