Welcome to the Haswell lab in the Department of Biology and the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University. Students in the Plant Biology, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Molecular Cell Biology, and Developmental Biology programs have done rotations in the lab.

We are using molecular genetic, biochemical, and live-imaging approaches--and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana--to address the following questions:

How do organisms perceive mechanical stimuli?

We are interested in how cells, organelles, and molecules sense and respond to physical force. Click here to learn more about how plants respond to touch.

Why do plants need mechanosensitive channels?

We are currently focusing our studies on a family of mechanosensitive channels related to MscS, a well-studied mechanosenstive channel from E. coli. Click here to learn more about the ten MscS-Like (MSL) proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Do mechanosensory systems control organelle morphology?

Organelles are not simple spheres, but take a variety of shapes and sizes that are correlated with their function. Mechanosensitive channels may serve to sense and respond to local changes in tension in the organellar envelope, thereby controlling organelle morphology. Click here to learn more about how MS channels may inform the size and shape of chloroplasts.

AVAILABLE POSITIONS

News and Notes

**Thank you, Obama Administration! Through NIH, we received 2 years of stimulus funding that will allow us to hire another person, and to buy some equipment not otherwise possible.

**Welcome to new graduate student Maggie Wilson! Maggie is interested in everything mechanical and botanical.

**See the lab update in the latest edition of Biologue.

**CONGRATULATIONS to Silvano for passing his qualifying exams, and to Ellen, who was selected as a finalist for the Life Sciences Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships Program!

**Silvano Ciani has taken the plunge and agreed to be the first Haswell graduate student! Silvano plans to use complementary genetic and imaging approaches to understand how plants respond to touch.

**The National Institutes of Health has funded a project in collaboration with the Rees and Phillips labs at Caltech, entitled "Biophysical, Structural, and Functional Analyses of Mechanosensitive Channels." Thank you, NIH!!

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