Amy Gladfelter is a quantitative cell biologist interested in fundamental mechanisms of cell organization.àShe is currently a Distinguished Duke Health Science and Technology Professor in the Cell Biology and Biomedical Engineering Departments at Duke University.àPreviously she was Professor of Biology and Associate chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillàfrom 2016âÂÂ2023.àShe remains a longstanding fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and is currently the course director of the Physiology Course. àIn her research program, she uses microscopy, biophysical and genetic approaches to study syncytial cells.àSyncytia are cells with many nuclei sharing a common cytoplasm and are found in fungi, throughout the human body such as in muscles and in the placenta as well as in many plants. In her work she examines how these large cells spatially organize the cytoplasm via biomolecular condensates and sense their shape. àThe current syncytial systems under study in her lab include multiple species of fungi and cells of the human placenta.
She trained at Princeton University (AB) with Bonnie Bassler, Duke University (Ph.D.) with Danny Lew and UniBasel Biozentrum (post-doc) with Peter Philippsen before starting her independent career at Dartmouth in the Biological Sciences department in 2006, where she was until 2016. ÃÂ She has been honored with the 2014 Graduate Mentoring Award from Dartmouth, the 2015 Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research from the American Society of Cell Biology, the 2020 Graduate school mentoring award from UNC and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.ÃÂ She is an elected fellow of AAAS, the America Academy of Microbiology and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.
GladfelterâÂÂs research is focused on the form and function of syncytial cells where many nuclei share a common cytoplasm. She uses biophysical, imaging and modeling approaches in filamentous fungi and placenta to learn the biology of these systems and uncover general principles of cell organization.
Her research program began trying to solve a puzzle of cell cycle regulation which was how nuclei can divide out of sync with one another in a common cytoplasm. This suggested some form of local regulation of the cell cycle.ÃÂ Her group found local control emerges from RNA-based condensates that restrict diffusion of cyclin transcripts and promote nuclear individuality so nuclei can divide independently of neighboring nuclei sharing a cytoplasm.ÃÂ Since that observation, which was one of the early roles described for condensates, she has been using this system and others to understand how RNA sequences and structures can control the molecular composition, identity and function of condensates .ÃÂ These studies extended to the RNA condensates in SARS CoV-2, which also induces syncytial cells, and now the enormous syncytiotrophoblast cells of placenta.
In a second area of work, she had studied how the septin cytoskeleton influences the shape of large syncytial cells.ÃÂ She has implemented new imaging techniques and developed innovative reconstitution assays to study septin filament dynamics on membranes.ÃÂ Her lab discovered septin filaments sense local cell curvature on the micron scale. This function is unique to septins amongst eukaryotic proteins and conserved from yeast to humans.ÃÂ Septins monitor membrane geometry at the base of dendritic spines, the cleavage furrow and cilia, so these studies have broad importance in learning how cell shape controls cell fate.
Here is a link to her Google Scholar page.