Flies with sunburn: modeling pain sensitization with Drosophila

Dr. Michael Galko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He received his BS (Biology) from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and his PhD (Cell Biology) from the University of California at San Francisco in 1999. Dr. Galko then went on to complete a post-doc research fellowship at Standford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Galko’s laboratory is interested in identifying the elusive signals that initiate and terminate different aspects of the organismal tissue repair response, as well as the genes that are required to execute each specific response. Ultimately, they wish to understand in molecular detail how the activities of diverse damage-responsive cell types are coordinated in space and time to give a functional tissue repair program. 

To pursue these interests Dr. Galko’s laboratory has developed a variety of tissue repair/response assays in the highly genetically tractable model organism, Drosophila melanogaster and are focusing their efforts on three critical responses: epidermal wound closure, inflammation (recruitment of blood cells to the site of injury), and nociceptive sensitization (lowering of the threshold for sensing painful stimuli following injury). Given that tissue repair responses are an ancient survival mechanism of multicellular animals, they expect that the functional importance of many of the genes they identify will be conserved between flies and vertebrates. 

Lunch will be provided.
_Hosted by: Dr. Geoffrey Ganter