We are pleased to announce that the joint winners of the 2014 JCS Prize are Anne-Lise Gaffuri and Elizabeth Crowell for their paper entitled ‘Engulfment of the midbody remnant after cytokinesis in mammalian cells’ (Crowell et al., 2014).
The prize, $1000, is awarded annually to the first author of the paper that is judged by the Editors and Editorial Board to be the best eligible paper published in the Journal of Cell Science that year. To be considered for the prize, the first author must be a student or a postdoc of no more than five years standing.
f01 Elizabeth Crowell was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earned her bachelor's degree in Indiana. Her interest in combatting cancer started with her first experience in research, at the Brown Cancer Center in Louisville, Kentucky. She participated in a project developing a vaccine against the human papillomavirus, which is responsible for virtually all cases of cervical cancer. Led by A. Bennett Jenson, she worked to genetically engineer tobacco plants to produce the viral capsid protein constituting the vaccine for subsequent inexpensive production and purification.
Convinced by the potential of biotechnology to improve lives, she went on to complete a master's degree at Michigan State University. There, she worked on a collaborative project with the biochemist Dean Dellapenna and plant breeder David Douches to genetically engineer potatoes that accumulate vitamin E. After publishing her results in early 2007, she made two main changes in her career. First, she turned towards fundamental research and, second, she moved to France, joining her husband who had just been hired as an assistant professor in nuclear physics.
Elizabeth was recruited at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Versailles on a French National Research Agency (ANR) PhD grant. Her PhD advisors, Samantha Vernhettes and Martine Gonneau, helped her rapidly gain the new skills in microscopy essential for studying the intracellular trafficking of cellulose synthase complexes. She completed her PhD in three years and published groundbreaking discoveries on the role of the cytoskeleton in plant cell wall deposition.
Elizabeth's expertise in image analysis and her passion for programming made her an interesting postdoctoral candidate, and she obtained a position in Arnaud Echard's team at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Using live cell imaging, she set out to study the fate of the midbody, a structure formed within the intercellular bridge at cytokinesis and implicated in cancerogenesis. Surprisingly, the midbody was not degraded by autophagy as previously described, but migrated freely over the cell membrane before being engulfed in a process that resembles phagocytosis. This discovery was explored further by using cell biology techniques, and revealed that midbody engulfment occurs in all cell lines tested (Crowell, et al., 2014), and in collaboration with the biophysicist Jean-Yves Tinevez, which permitted to simulate midbody turnover in a dynamic cell population (Crowell, et al., 2013).
Now living in Normandy, Elizabeth is pursuing her scientific career in the private sector, with emphasis on the bio-informatics field.
f02 Anne-Lise Gaffuri grew up in Paris, France. After two years of preparatory classes for French engineering schools in biology, chemistry and physics, she studied chemistry and physics in a prestigious French Institute, the ESPCI-ParisTech. In parallel, she also studied cell biology at the University Pierre and Marie Curie. In 2009, she graduated as an engineer in chemistry and physics, and obtained a master's degree in cell biology.
Following her Master internship, Anne-Lise started a PhD under the supervision of Zsolt Lenkei in the Neuronal structure and dynamics lab (ESPCI-ParisTech). In order to better understand the role of different signalling pathways in neuronal plasticity and, in particular, learning and memory formation, she aimed to combine the power of Drosophila genetics with the experimental accessibility and single-cell resolution of low-density primary neuronal cultures. As this tool was lacking, she successfully developed a simple and efficient new method to maintain low-density cultures of primary Drosophila neurons. Anne-Lise applied this new method to study compartmentalized cAMP/PKA activation in the mushroom body, the Drosophila olfactory memory center because, although this phenomenon had been demonstrated to be crucial for the formation of memory, the molecular mechanisms of long-range intraneuronal signaling were still unknown. Using her knowledge of physics and imaging, Anne-Lise mapped the cAMP/PKA-signalling dynamics in individual axons of mature Drosophila neurons that had been grown in compartmentalized microfluidic devices and expressing genetically encoded Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based probes. Her results indicated that rapidly diffusing axonal cAMP is a long-range signalling molecule in neurons that could be responsible for long-term memory formation. In 2012, Anne-Lise obtained her PhD with high honours and decided to start a postdoc at the Institut Pasteur in Paris under the supervision of Arnaud Echard.
Upon joining the team, Anne-Lise started working on the determination of the fate of the midbody ring after cell division. As studies had suggested that remnant accumulation has a role in cell differentiation and proliferation, understanding the fate of remnants and how they accumulate was a key question in the field. During her postdoc, Anne-Lise demonstrated in a variety of immortalized and primary cells that the great majority of remnants are actually cut twice, and that they move for several hours to the cell surface, where they are engulfed by a ‘phagocytic-like mechanism’ that relies on actin- and cation-dependent receptors. Surprisingly, remnants can be exchanged between sister and even non-sister cells. Thus, our study published in Journal of Cell Science changed the understanding of how remnants are inherited and degraded in mammalian cells, by suggesting a mechanism of how remnants signal over long distances between cells (Crowell, et al., 2014).
Since September 2014, Anne-Lise has been working as a researcher at Adocia, a Biotechnology Company located in Lyon, France, that specialises in the development of formulations for innovative delivery of different types of insulin, therapeutic proteins and anticancer drugs.
