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Wu Lab
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Research

Biological systems operate away from equilibrium but the applications of non-equilibrium dynamics in our current understanding of biology remain limited. The lab of Min Wu is fascinated by oscillations and travelling waves that take place on or near the cell cortex. Much of the current attempts to deconstruct cell biological systems is through dissecting molecules and their interactions, an approach only effective if the function is encoded at the level of individual genes. Due to the rarity of genes linked to fixed functionalities, it has been long recognized that a better proxy would be molecular networks and the interactions of these networks. Oscillations and waves are powerful readouts for understanding both the components and the topology of the biological networks. Quantitative parameters of these patterns also help to define dynamical states of the cell and transition between states. Lastly, it is tempting to speculate that dynamic patterns could encode spatiotemporal information.

  • Self-organization and Pattern Formation

    Our lab discovered that membrane curvature-generating proteins in the F-BAR family—FBP17, CIP4—and the small GTPase CDC42 can form rhythmic, wave-like patterns on the surface of mast cells, a type of immune cell involved in both innate and adaptive immunity (Wu et al., PNAS 2013).

  • Information Processing and Chaos

  • Cell Division

    Mesoscale patterns contain rich information that could potentially bridge the gap between molecular scale dynamics and cellular level decision- making processes. In particular, we are keen in testing the hypothesis that the feedback regulations underlying cortical pattern formation could shed light on the fundamental but little known problem of cell growth and cell size regulation.




  • Size and Scaling

    How cells sense their size, or whether they sense it at all, remains a fundamental open question in biology. We discovered that during mitosis, the wavelength of cortical waves, which is determined by the oscillation frequency, scales with cell size (Xiao et al., Developmental Cell, 2017).

  • Membrane Curvature in Endocytosis

    We are interested in in vitro and cell-free reconstitution approaches to address fundamental questions in membrane biology, particularly those related to membrane compartmentalization, curvature generation, vesicular budding and tubulation.