CONTROL OF CELL CYCLE ENTRY

Our goal

Our goal is to understand how cells achieve precise control of cell cycle entry.

Why this is important

Precise control of cell cycle entry is vital both during development and in tissue homeostasis. Loss of control of cell cycle entry is a key feature of tumour cells, allowing them to proliferate, even when conditions are unfavourable, and drive tumourigenesis. We investigate how cell cycle entry is controlled in healthy cells which allows us to then determine how these mechanisms are subverted by tumour cells, so that we can start to design better targeted therapies.

Our approach

We use a number of tools to investigate cell cycle entry control in mammalian systems. These include biochemical, cell and molecular biology and proteomic approaches. One powerful technique we use is quantitative, live, single-cell imaging. We genetically-engineer cells to express fluorescently-labelled biosensors and signalling proteins so that we can accurately measure their expression relative to each other and to cell cycle entry. This has been pivotal to understanding how the coordinated expression of multiple proteins can drive cell state transitions.