Highlighted Publications

Chou KT^*, Lee DD^*, Chiou JG^*, Galera-Laporta L, San Ly, Garcia-Ojalvo J, Süel GM. A segmentation clock patterns cellular differentiation in a bacterial biofilm. (2022) Cell. 185(1):145-157 *equal contribution.

We discovered that Bacillus subtilis biofilms can utilize a molecular clock to pattern their nitrogen stress response into segments of concentric rings. This mechanism is analogous to the vertebrate segmentation clock. Moreover, the stress response triggers patterned cell differentiation into spores, demonstrating a nice microbial example of multicellular development.

Chiou JG, Moran KD, Lew DJ. How cells determine the number of polarity sites. (2021) eLife. 10:e58768.

We genetically manipulated the budding yeast to abandon their uni-polar budding behavior and grow multiple buds simultaneously. This provided experimental support to the mass-conserved reaction-diffusion fromework published in PLoS Comp. Bio. 2018. Additionally, this paper demonstrated that two additional polarity modes, "equalization" and "splitting", are also theoretically possible.

Chiou JG, Ramirez SA, Elston TC, Witelski TP, Schaeffer DG, Lew DJ. Principles that govern competition or co-existence in Rho-GTPase driven polarization. (2018) PLoS Computational Biology. 14(4):e1006095.

My personal favorite. We developed a theoretical framework that is sufficient to recapitulate the patterning dynamics of polarity proteins in the budding yeast. This is a milimalistic 2-equation partial differential system that resembles a mass-conserved version of Turing's reaction-diffusion model proposed in 1952. This paper demonstrates that the reason the budding yeast only grows one bud boils down to whether a multi-polar steady state is mathematically stable.

Other Publications

Lai H, Chiou JG, Zhurikhina A, Zyla TR, Tsygankov D, Lew DJ. Temporal regulation of morphogenetic events in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (2018) Molecular Biology of the Cell. mbcE18030188.

Chiou JG, Balasubramanian MK, Lew DJ. Cell Polarity in Yeast. (2017) Annual Reviews in Cell and Developmental Biology. 33:77-101.

Wu CF, Chiou JG, Minakova M, Woods B, Tsygankov D, Zyla TR, Savage NS, Elston TC, Lew DJ. Role of competition between polarity sites in establishing a unique front. (2015) eLife. 4:e11611.