Gavin Schlissel is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Pulin Li’s lab studying cell signaling and how proteins move between cells. We sat down with Gavin to learn more about him and his experiences in and out of the lab. In my current work with Pulin, we recreate developmental events in cell culture to observe the behavior of developmentally important genes, proteins and circuits. The question I’m working on is how signaling proteins, which transmit information between cells, travel from their source to their destination. We’ve made some progress in understanding how the signaling protein Hedgehog can travel through tissues, and I’m currently trying to build on that work to understand general mechanisms of protein movement between cells.
