About her postdoctoral project

Sarcomeres  are  the force-generating  and  load-bearing  machines  of  muscle.  Each  sarcomere  contains  a  pseudo-crystalline order of bipolar actin, myosin and titin filaments. During muscle development, sarcomeres assemble into long  periodic  chains  called  myofibrils  that  span  the  entire  muscle.  How  sarcomeric  components  organize  into molecularly ordered structures (molecular order) while assembling long myofibrils (macroscopic order) is an important unsolved question. To tackle this question, I am using genetic, mechanical and advanced imaging approaches together with polarization resolved microscopy to probe  the  molecular  order  of  sarcomeric  components  in  developing  Drosophila  muscles in vivo and test the role of tension for order generation. The  originality  of  this  project  relies  on  the  integration  of  quantitative  approaches  to  bridge  from  the  molecular to the macroscopic scale to explain how large muscle fibers assemble their contractile units.