Title: Extracting the invisible from live cell microscopy
Dr. Assaf Zaritsky completed his Ph.D. at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University in 2014 under the joint supervision of Ilan Tsarfaty (Medical School), Eshel ben-Jacob (Physics) and Lior Wolf (Computer Science). Assaf is a postdoctoral fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He joined the Danuser lab in September 2013 and is currently a visiting scholar in Benny Geiger's lab at the Weizmann Institute. His current research interests are at the boundaries of cell biology and computer science. Motivated by fundamental questions in cell biology, he develops and applies specialized analytic tools to study complex dynamic cell systems by designing hypothesis-driven computational approaches for image data analysis. Specifically, Assaf studies cell dynamics and motility, from the intracellular to the multicellular scales.
Abstract: Cell imaging has entered the “big data” era. New technologies in microscopy and molecular biology produce high-content and multidimensional data sets encapsulating complex and dynamic patterns that are inaccessible by human visual observation. One example is the emergence of collective behavior in multi-cellular systems. From embryonic development, through synchronized beating of cardiac muscle cells to collective cell death - individual cells use basic cellular machinery to influence and respond to neighboring cells through a complex interplay of chemical and physical cues. How these local interactions are integrated in space and time to induce collective patterns is yet unknown. By designing and applying new analytical methods to migrating groups of epithelial cells, we discovered how local mechanical fluctuations induce long-range inter-cellular communication and identified potential molecular pathways driving this mechanism. We concluded that for effective collective migration contractility-mediating pathways must be optimally tuned to compromise between generation of motility forces and restriction of inter-cellular communication.
