Defining the signalling requirements of EMT for both cancer metastasis and neural crest migration

Mary started her Fellowship in March 2010 and is studying how neural crest migration is timed during development in Professor Jim Smith's laboratory at the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research. She has started a small-molecules screen to identify compounds that affect the onset of neural crest migration in zebrafish embryos. Identification of hit compound targets will be carried out in collaboration with Dr Randall Peterson in Boston. In parallel, she is complementing the screen using high-throughput sequencing methods on neural crest cells and Slug-expressing carcinoma cells to study the regulatory networks regulating EMT in these cells.