Event
Special Bioengineering Seminar: Shelly Peyton
Monday, March 8, 2010
11:00 a.m.
Room 2110, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Sameer Shah
sameer@umd.edu
Physicochemical Control of Cell Migration Using Engineered Extracellular Matrices
Presented by Shelly Peyton
NIH
Cell migration is a tightly regulated process, driven by soluble growth factors (chemotaxis), insoluble cell-adhesive proteins (haptotaxis), cell-cell interactions, and most recently, mechanical cues (durotaxis). These cues are often dynamic, and are known regulators of migratory phenotype in a variety of cell types throughout the body. At sites of tissue damage and regeneration, such as in wounds, these cues often appear in gradients, coercing immune cells, fibroblasts, or progenitor cells to the sites of repair. In normally quiescent tissues, organized matrix and strong cell-cell contacts cooperate to inhibit local cell migration. In stark contrast, pathological tissue niches (e.g. diseased arteries, tumor stroma) often contain disorganized matrix and disrupted cell-cell contacts, driving improper migration and disastrous consequences. Recent efforts to decipher how the extracellular matrix (ECM) is able to biophysically and biochemically regulate cell migration have exploited several natural and synthetic biomaterials to create in vitro ECM analogs. I will be discussing how we, as engineers, can create simple, yet elegant mimics of the ECM with rationally designed biomaterial model systems to study how a diverse environment of biophysical and biochemical cues (such as tissue elasticity, adhesivity, and geometry) can regulate cell migration in vitro. These physicochemically tunable materials can provide a powerful platform for signaling studies as well as help guide rational scaffold design for regenerative medicine applications.
About the Speaker
Shelly Peyton received her B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2002 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine in 2007. There, she worked with Dr. Andrew Putnam and studied how the physical properties of 2 and 3-dimensional materials regulated smooth muscle cell phenotypic plasticity. As a graduate student, Shelly was funded by two different individual fellowships, from the US Department of Education and the ARCS Foundation. Shelly is currently an NIH postdoctoral fellow working with Drs. Douglas Lauffenburger and Linda Griffith in the Biological Engineering department at MIT, investigating how the biophysical properties of 3D model scaffolds can direct marrow stem cell migration.
