The London Research Institute research groups are based at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Clare Hall. Our major research themes are: the biology of tumours and tissues, cellular regulatory mechanisms and genomic integrity and cell cycle.
Helen McNeill
The Developmental Patterning Laboratory headed by Helen McNeill focused on two questions concerning planar polarity. Firstly, how is tissue organisation controlled by the transcription factor, Mirror? And secondly, how is cell and tissue polarity regulated by the cell adhesion molecule, Fat?
A central problem in cell and developmental biology is understanding how cells and groups of cells become organised into higher order structures. One form of higher organisation that was investigated by the lab was planar polarity. Planar polarity is the coordinate organisation of cells within the plane of a single layered sheet of cells. This higher level organisation of cells is crucial to their proper functioning: planar polarity of the vertebrate inner ear is essential to proper hearing and balance, similarly planar polarity of the fly eye is essential for accurate vision. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster was used as a genetically tractable organism to investigate the developmental control of planar polarity.
Helen left the LRI to join the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute on Toronto.
Significant LRI Papers
- Bilioni A, Craig, G, Hill C, McNeill H. Iroquois transcription factors recognize a unique motif to mediate transcriptional repression in vivo. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2005;102(41):14671-14676 (Abstract)
- Srinivasan S, Armstrong J, Dahlsveen I, McNeill H, Tamkun, J. The Drosophila trithorax group protein Kismet facilitates an early step in transcriptional elongation by RNA Polymerase II. Development. 2005;132(7),1623-35 (Abstract)
- Bateman JM, McNeill H. Temporal control of differentiation by the Insulin receptor/Tor pathway in Drosophila. Cell. 2004;119,87–96 (Abstract)
- Fanto M, Clayton L, Meredith J, Hardiman K, Kerridge S, McNeill H. The tumor-suppressor and cell adhesion molecule Fat controls planar polarity via physical interactions with Atrophin, a transcriptional co-repressor. Development. 2003;130(4):763-774 (Abstract)
- Ma D, Yang CH, McNeill H, Simon MA, Axelrod JD. Fidelity in planar cell polarity signalling. Nature. 2003;421(6922):543-7 (Abstract)
