Events

Investigation of Cell Morphogenesis Regulated by GTPases Signaling via Spatiotemporal Frequency Analysis

Biomedical Engineering
Lecture / Panel
 
Open to the Public
A Cos7 fibroblast-like cell with overlaid cell boundaries
Zoom

Speaker:

Xiao Ma, PhD

Industry Assistant Professor, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Abstract:

Cell morphogenesis driven by cytoskeleton dynamics and regulated by various cellular signaling pathways, such as Rho GTPases, is essential to a vast range of cellular processes including migration, proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. Time series analysis and cross-correlation analysis help
reveal the degree of correlation and time-sequential relationship between the signaling activation and cell morphodynamics, but may be susceptible to the high variance and fidelity concerns. By harnessing frequency analysis, we can convert the cell morphodynamics and signaling dynamics data from time domain to the frequency domain, and extract the characteristic frequency components or bands that convey more convergent but enriched information. The canonical FT does not reveal time domain information about the cell morphodynamics and signaling dynamics, which is a critical drawback to obtain the precise and integral insight for the spatiotemporal regulation. To fill this gap, we adopt Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) and Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) in terms of their particular strength to integrate time, frequency, and magnitude information, and better unveil the spatiotemporal regulation of GTPases signaling on cell morphogenesis.


Dr. Xiao Ma received his B.S. (2004) and M.S. (2007) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University in 2013. His research focused on protein–DNA aptamer interactions and computational modeling of electrically stimulated biomolecular systems. After graduation, he joined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a postdoctoral fellow in Cell Biology and Bioinformatics, where he developed spatiotemporal morphodynamic profiling methods to study how Rho GTPases regulate cell migration. In 2019, he was appointed Industry Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU. Here his research integrates live-cell imaging, computational biology, and advanced frequency-domain analysis to investigate the signaling path-ways that govern cell morphogenesis.

A Cos7 fibroblast-like cell with overlaid cell boundaries
A Cos7 fibroblast-like cell with overlaid cell boundaries sampled at 10 sec intervals for 30 min, showing early (blue) and late (red) time points; scale bar = 20 μm.