The Elting Lab has several currently open positions.

We are recruiting NCSU undergraduates for positions beginning in the Summer of 2022 (with the potential to continue into the school year). For full consideration for these paid positions, interested students should contact Dr. Elting by April 18. See instructions on the Join tab.

We are also recruiting one or more postdoctoral scholars to work on the mechanics of the mitotic spindle. Applicants should apply by April 18 to ensure full consideration, though applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled. See more details on the Join tab.

Mohamed and Kim's paper on mechanical perturbation of the cytokinetic ring by laser ablation, which is a collaboration of our group with the Laplante group (also in the QCDB cluster at NCSU) is now published. See the publications tab for more info!

Several papers from the group were recently accepted, including Ana Sofia's first author paper at the Journal of Microscopy (with contributions from lab member Parsa, too, and collaboration with Lex Kemper and Jamie Jennings), Marc's first author paper at Molecular Biology of the Cell (with contributions from lab members Grant and Elizabeth, and a collaboration with the Ohi group), and two first author papers from Parsa! Check them out on the publications tab.

Leeba Ann Chacko selected Parsa's preprint (posted on bioRxiv) to highlight with a preLight post. We really appreciate the feedback from Leeba, who raises some great questions that we hope to investigate in future work. We also appreciated the chance to respond to some of her questions, and you can read our response at the bottom of the preLight.

Side note that in addition to her science, Leeba also makes some amazing science art, which you can check out on her twitter. Look at this adorable pombe (with bonus points for the pun):

I’ve been missing my Pombe buddies since it’s been some time since I’ve been to the lab. Here’s fission (heading) east. #Pombeart #SorryNotSorry pic.twitter.com/Ix8n1sdWoH

— Leeba Ann Chacko (@LeebaAnnChacko) June 28, 2021

We've posted a new preprint from undergraduate and now post-bac researcher Parsa Zareiesfandabadi. Parsa has interrogated the collapse of the S. pombe spindle that follows laser ablation. Contrary to previous hypotheses, which implicated the nuclear envelope and/or chromosomes in this motion, Parsa found that it's microtubule dependent and that the molecular motor dynein is involved. You can read the paper here.

Undergraduate researcher Ana Sofía Uzsoy developed a tool to automatically track the two ends of the elongating S. pombe spindle. You can read the paper here. If you want to try out the code, it's available on Github as a plug-in for ImageJ. Let us know if you give it a try!

The Elting Lab has received a five year, R35 Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. This grant will support our research on the mitotic spindle. We're very grateful to the NIH for the support, and are excited for the new science this will allow us to do. You can read more about the grant here. Also - we'll soon be hiring a postdoctoral researcher for this grant! So, if you're interested in the biophysics of the mitotic spindle and are searching for a postdoc opportunity, watch this space. More information coming soon.

The Elting Lab's first preprint was posted on BioRxiv! You can read the paper here. This project was a great team effort, led by graduate student Marc Begley, and also including contributions from undergraduates Elizabeth Davis and Grant Sherrill. Marc et al. ablated bundles of spindle microtubules called k-fibers that are responsible for attaching chromosomes to the mitotic spindle and ultimately for segregating them. This allows us to probe k-fiber mechanical cohesion and its molecular origin. In collaboration with Puck Ohi's group, we found that the kinesin-12 Kif15 is at least partially responsible for mechanically reinforcing k-fibers.