Dear EMBRIO Members,

All-Hands Labs

Thanks again to recent presenters this past Monday, Alex Nguyen (Ph.D. Student in the Chan Lab) with Chrissy Boody (Ph.D. Student in the Evans Lab), and Chang Ding (Ph.D. Student in the Deng Lab)  presenting their collaborative research: "Measuring cell and tissue-level stiffnesses with atomic force microscopy" in oocytes and zebrafish. On November 3rd we featured the Kim lab with Ph.D. student Jeffery Coulter presenting his collaborations with the Evans Lab and Kinzer-Ursem Lab on "Hybrid models of the mouse egg and dendritic spine", and presented June Kim's work and future directions Modeling the plant cortical cytoskeleton with the Staiger and Iyer-Pascuzzi Labs .

You can locate recordings, chat files, and summaries of these talks, and all of the Institute's previous regular seminar sessions going back to 2021 on our shared Box drive under EMBRIO Institute > All-Hands Meeting Recordings: https://app.box.com/s/48uqgrgoy5ygp1tsj2l3lafoy8ubgkop (please note these are for use w/in EMBRIO, and not to be distributed w/o permission).

New Publications

Exciting New Research on Immune Cell Navigation!
Led by the Qing Deng Lab, four EMBRIO Institute labs (Deng, Staiger, Jayant, Zhang) have collaborated on research just published online in Journal of Cell Biology. Results point to a critical role for inwardly rectifying potassium channels (Kir) in guiding neutrophils during chemotaxis.

Wang, T., D.H. Kim, C. Ding, D. Wang, W. Zhang, M. Silic, X. Cheng, K. Shao, T.H. Ku, C. Zheng, J. Xie, C., Xiao, S., Jayant, K., Yuan, A. Chubykin, C.J. Staiger, G.J. Zhang, and Q. Deng. (2026). Inwardly rectifying potassium channels regulate direction sensing during neutrophil chemotaxis. J. Cell Biol., 225(1): pgs. https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202503037

🔍 Key Findings:

💡 This work introduces membrane potential as a key player in the feedforward mechanisms that steer immune cells through complex tissue environments—linking electrical signaling with GPCR pathways and cytoskeletal dynamics.

📄 Read the full article here: Inwardly rectifying potassium channels promote directional sensing during neutrophil chemotaxis