Mr. Mrinmoy Pal (13MS116) recently attended the Else Kröner Forschungskolleg Göttingen cancer symposium 2017, entitled “Exploiting Tumor-Specific Vulnerabilities for Improved Cancer Treatment” from November 15 to November 17, 2017. Mrinmoy also presented a poster during the symposium which was based on the work carried out by him as a DAAD fellow under the supervision of Prof. Steven A. Johnsen at Department of General, Visceral and Pediatric Surgery, University Medical Center Göttingen.

To support the financial cost of this scientific trip to Göttingen, IISER Kolkata awarded him the International Travel Grant.

Biswas, Arikta; Alex, Amal and Sinha, Bidisha. 2017. “Interference based mapping of cell membrane fluctuations reveal their active regulation and transient heterogeneities.” Biophysical Journal, 113, 1768-1781

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2017.08.041

Dr. Malancha Ta, faculty of Department of Biological Sciences, recently published an interesting piece of work with her team in the journal ‘Stem Cells and Development’ [Arora S, Saha S, Roy S, Das M, Jana S and Ta M. (2015) Role of Nonmuscle Myosin II in Migration of Wharton's Jelly-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells. Stem Cells Dev. Apr 29. (Epub ahead of print)]. In this paper, the authors attempted to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms responsible for migration of WJ-MSCs and showed for the first time that inhibition of NMII by pharmacological inhibitors resulted in significant reduction of migration. Further trying to dissect the role of individual NMII isoforms, they established that down regulation of NMIIA but not NMIIB expression led to cells failing to retract their trailing edge and losing cell-cell cohesiveness while exhibiting non-directional migratory pathway. And finally, using a PCR array, they also demonstrated that inhibition of NMII resulted in increased gene expression of extracellular matrix proteins and adhesion molecules which possibly led to stronger adhesions and hence, decreased migration of WJ-MSCs.