Dr. Clare Yu
The Transportation System Inside a Living Cell

University of California, Irvine

A cell is like a city. It has all the basic infrastructure that a city has. For example, it has power plants (mitochondria), workers (proteins), a library (genome), recycling centers (lysosomes), etc. A cell also has a transportation system that works like container shipping. There are interstate highways (microtubules) and local streets (actin filaments) as well as trucks or motors (kinesin, dynein, and myosin) that pull large cargo vesicles along the roads. We are working with Steven Gross' group (UCI Dept. of Cell and Developmental Biology) to understand how the motors and roads conspire to get cargo vesicles where they need to go. The motion of the vesicles does not proceed smoothly in one direction. Rather it can frequently reverse direction along one road or switch roads as it diffuses through the cell. So how does the cargo get to where it needs to go? To answer this question, we are using a variety of theoretical techniques including computer simulations, graph theory, time series analysis, and noise analysis to analyze the motion. For more information "Description of transportion inside a living cell" (PDF).

Biography:

Professor Yu earned her A. B. (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) from Princeton University. She did postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining the faculty at UCI in 1989. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. She has a broad range of research interests which include disordered systems, biophysics, noise, and quantum computing.