Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Although all organisms respond to external stimuli, the origins of multicellularity necessitated the evolution of specialized mechanisms to coordinate the actions of individual cells into a singular response. Cell-cell signaling is critical for the biology of animals and other multicellular organisms but key steps in the evolution of signaling are not understood.
Our research aims to address the origin and core mechanisms of animal cell signaling during the transition to multicellularity. In multicellular organisms, receptors facilitate intercellular communication and adaptor molecules link cell surface signaling with central regulators of intracellular growth and survival. Although animal, plant and fungi evolved through separate and independent transitions to multicellularity cell surface receptor genes expanded and diversified in each of these lineages, suggesting that the expansion and specialization of receptor-mediated signaling enabled complex multicellularity. Nonetheless, few studies have assessed the functional relevance of signaling receptors in evolutionarily-relevant model organisms.
To reconstruct how molecule sensing was integrated with core signaling pathways during the evolution of animals, and uncover core principles of animal cell signaling, we investigate how unicellular relatives of animals use cell surface receptors to detect extracellular signals. We use chemical genetic approaches by leveraging available genomics resources combined with targeted pharmacology, transgene expression, and genome editing. We use choanoflagellates, a phylogenetically-relevant and experimentally-tractable model system to study the evolution of receptor signaling in animals. Our goal is to uncover the ancestral functions of receptor signaling in animals and develop a framework to identify general principles of receptor signaling relevant to other multicellular organisms (e.g. plants, fungi).
