the shepherd lab
“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” - Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
Hey cells with ectopic Snail expression exhibit robust actin stress fibre formation as detected by rhodamine-conjugated phalloidin staining.
our research
Snail in metastatic ovarian cancer: The ability of carcinoma cells to undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT, affords them with enhanced capacity to invade, migrate and metastasize. We identified that ovarian cancer cells induce an EMT phenotype during spheroid formation, and that the transcription factor Snail is the most robustly upregulated of the EMT master regulators. Our most recent gene knockdown and ectopic overexpression studies have demonstrated that Snail can control the invasive nature of ovarian cancer spheroids and promote metastasis. Current work is underway to determine whether Snail is required (i.e. via CRISPR-mediated SNAI1 deletion) for ovarian cancer cell dissemination in pre-clinical orthotopic metastasis models.