The central focus of the lab is to understand how signaling pathway architecture and integration result in specific cell fates and how these properties have been hijacked in cancer cells. In particular, we are interested in assessing the extent to which cell-to-cell heterogeneity can affect the temporal dynamics and regulation of signaling pathways. We are focusing on the E2F/Rb network and have established a platform to follow in real time the activation and expression of E2F1 at the single cell level. In collaboration with the You lab (Duke Biomedical Engineering), which has developed mathematical approaches to model the behavior of the Rb/E2F network, we wish to identify functional characteristics in the signaling dynamics that may underlie disparate cell fates in response to a given external cue. Ultimately, our goal is to build an integrative understanding of the logic and structure in aberrant signaling network(s) known to drive tumor development and metastasis.
