Matthew J. Paszek, Cornell University
Assistant Professor
Ithaca, New York
mjp31@cornell.edu
Office:
(607) 255-6277
Expert In
Bio/Research
The hardware for intracellular signal transduction consists of thousands of membrane receptors and signaling molecules carefully arranged throughout the cell. Notably, the cell expends the majority of its energy maintaining its biomolecules in spatial arrangements outside of thermodynamic equilib...
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Bio/Research
The hardware for intracellular signal transduction consists of thousands of membrane receptors and signaling molecules carefully arranged throughout the cell. Notably, the cell expends the majority of its energy maintaining its biomolecules in spatial arrangements outside of thermodynamic equilibrium. The Paszek group investigates how signaling patterns emerge from these spatial arrangements and what role mechanical forces and biophysical interactions play in organizing biomolecules at molecular length scales. In essence, we seek to understand how life works at tiny, nanometer length scales.
An active area of research by our group is in the biological frontier of glycobiology. Every living cell in the body is coated with a sugary film called the glycocalyx. We are currently investigating how these sugars spatially configure the machinery of signal transduction. In cancer, we've discovered that these sugars are anything but sweet, and play a major role in the development of aggressive, lethal cancers. Our hope is to understand how these sugars modify signaling in disease specific contexts, such as cancer, and what role metabolism plays in organizing signaling molecules through regulation of these sugars. Our methodology is highly interdisciplinary, and includes approaches from computational biology, molecular biology, cell biology, super-resolution optical imaging, and glycobiology.
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An active area of research by our group is in the biological frontier of glycobiology. Every living cell in the body is coated with a sugary film called the glycocalyx. We are currently investigating how these sugars spatially configure the machinery of signal transduction. In cancer, we've discovered that these sugars are anything but sweet, and play a major role in the development of aggressive, lethal cancers. Our hope is to understand how these sugars modify signaling in disease specific contexts, such as cancer, and what role metabolism plays in organizing signaling molecules through regulation of these sugars. Our methodology is highly interdisciplinary, and includes approaches from computational biology, molecular biology, cell biology, super-resolution optical imaging, and glycobiology.
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