Evalyn Beall remembers her first experience in a biology lab, in her first year of college at University of Wisconsin, River Falls. “It was new and exciting to find out that there are still answers to things that are unknown,” she said. “I can go out and find the gaps and the questions that need to be answered, and I can design an experiment to answer those questions. Then we’ll have knowledge that nobody else has ever thought of before.”
Her labmate Madalene Halley agreed. “I like that we’re finding something completely new and figuring out how things work so we can share it with other people,” she said. “And we’re right at the beginning of the process.”
Beall and Halley are both fourth-year doctoral students in Dr. Maureen Cetera’s lab, where they study the planar cell polarity pathway. Halley explained that this is like the cellular compass. “It tells cells which side is which, then they know where to move and how to migrate to create tissues correctly to form an embryo.”
“Polarity is everywhere,” Beall added. “Most organs and body systems require some form of migration or some sense of which way is which in order to form properly.” She is studying the role of polarity in our bodies’ lymphatic systems, which circulate two to four liters of liquid every day. V-shaped valve structures within the lymphatic vessels need to know which way to point in order to keep the liquid circulating in the right direction. Beall is looking specifically at the role of the polarity gene Frizzled-6 (FZD6) in a collaboration with a physician-scientist to model patients with rare but life-threatening genetic lymphatic anomalies.
Halley, by contrast, explained her work this way, “My mom knows I work with fancy guinea pigs.” The same phenomenon that tells lymphatic cells which direction to point tells hair follicles which way to grow. She is mapping gene mutations that disrupt planar cell polarity and describing how the proteins they produce differ from the wild-type version.
It’s easy to be distracted by the guinea pigs with the swirly hair, Halley said. “People might ask, ‘Why does this matter?’ and get lost in the phenotype. But we’re looking directly at an outward readout of the cells’ compass to understand the mechanisms behind it. No one sees it, so we have no clue what is happening. But we can use these models to help figure out what’s going on and how we develop.”
Halley, who did her undergrad at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is in a dual Ph.D. and master’s program, said, “I’ve always been interested in how small things work in our body to make such big changes.” She said the thrill of understanding basic science questions will likely keep her in academia, with a postdoc in her future. “It would be great to be a principal investigator and be able to come up with the questions we need to answer. You can’t find that in industry. And I really love mentoring, so I’d love to help students get that spark for research as well.”
Beall, by contrast, said she is keeping her options open. “My driving force for doing research is wanting to uncover disease mechanisms,” she said. “I think that’s the through-line to my scientific career. I want to focus on direct translation of my work to human health.”
Both young scientists said that having a mixture of perspectives in the lab has been a boon. They and their other lab partners understand each other’s projects and are able to be sounding boards for each other, give constructive feedback, and suggest interpretations. A helpful little nudge here, a smart question there—in the lab, as in our cells, a small change can make a big difference. — Tricia Cornell