Prachee is the co-founder and CSO of Arcadia Science. She comes from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth where she is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Prachee is also the President of ASAPbio and chair of the board of directors of eLife.
Building on the open-source platform PubPub, we’re sharing the first iteration of our publishing website. In addition to posting our first set of research pubs, we’re documenting our progress in developing this new system for sharing science and hope you’ll provide feedback.
Cells can be highly motile, moving in and out of a microscope’s field of view. Understanding complex life cycles is difficult without continuous observation. To overcome this challenge, we’ve developed a 3D-printed microchamber device to confine cells for long-term visualization.
Quantifying movement is a powerful window into cellular functions. However, cells can generate movement through a variety of complex mechanisms. Here, we generate a flexible framework for comparing an especially variable type of motility: cellular crawling.
The process of deciding whether a candidate actin homolog represents a “true” actin is tricky. We propose clear and data-driven criteria to define actin that highlight the functional importance of this protein while accounting for phylogenetic diversity.
Long protrusions from several microalgal species appear to help cells move, capture prey, transport mitochondria and chloroplasts, and more. Are they filopodia that evolved abilities more like other actin- or microtubule-based structures, or are they something new?
Prachee Avasthi, Cameron Dale MacQuarrie, and Atanas Radkov
PA
BB
Published: Mar 29, 2023
Treating P. tricornutum cells with serine endopeptidases or certain cytoskeletal inhibitors induces the formation of cell wall-free protoplasts and suggests a novel role for actin and myosin in preventing protoplast formation.
Prachee Avasthi, Tara Essock-Burns, Galo Garcia III, Jase Gehring, David Q. Matus, David G. Mets, and Ryan York
PA
TE
+3
Published: May 03, 2023
Constraining motile microorganisms for live imaging often requires costly microfluidics or optical traps to keep them in view. We used patterned stamps and agar to make versatile, inexpensive “microchambers” and offer a way to predict the right chamber size for a given organism.