Text and Interview by Nicole LeBrasseur
Starting up a brand new lab is difficult enough. But when a hurricane soon forces you thousands of miles from your new research home, a whole new layer of complications arises, as Rebecca Worthylake recently found.
Blood cells aren't pigeonholed by their name. Although they
circulate in the blood, white blood cells such as
leukocytes often fight their way out of the vessels
to fight infection. The decision to leave is not
theirs alone; endothelial cells send signals that
cause blood cells to attach to the vessel wall and
migrate to the inflammation site (1). The
blood cell then uses signaling pathways coordinated
by the Rho GTPase family to loosen the endothelial
barrier (2) and make its own cytoskeletal
changes (3) that allow it to migrate
through the vessel, a process called extravasation.
The signals must be precise, as inappropriate leakage
can cause inflammatory disorders (4).
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Like the leukocytes she studies, Becky Worthylake knows when to go with the flow and when to fight for staying power. Not long after she moved to New Orleans as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University Health Science Center, Katrina forced Worthylake to relocate. But even while the city still recovers from the devastation, she has found that returning to New Orleans is worth the effort.
BEFORE THE STORM
How were you first drawn into biology?
I was actually a math major at first, but after
taking some psychology courses, I got really
interested in science. I switched my major to chemistry
with the idea of going on to graduate school, but I first
wanted to get a little bit of lab experience. So I
went to work as a technician in a lab that was
differentiating muscle cells from myoblasts into
myofibers.
I thought that was really exciting, that you could get cells to change their behavior in a culture setting. I wanted to know how cells understood where they were in the body and how they would know what to do based on their environment.
Did you get to follow up on that interest?
Yes, in graduate school (at the University of Utah),
I worked with breast tumor cells. We would culture
them on matrigel, where they could form these little
acini structures. At that point, I decided that I was
really interested in the mechanisms that regulated the
changes in cell shape and cell movement that would allow
the cells to form those sorts of structures.
Then I went to the University of North Carolina to work with Keith Burridge on Rho signaling and the regulation of the cytoskeleton and cell migration. A lot of their work was with fibroblasts and epithelial cells at the time. I decided to look at the migration of leukocytes because leukocytes are normally highly migratory cells, even in adults, whereas fibroblasts aren't as motile. In particular, I was interested in their migration during inflammation, when they interact with the lining of the blood vessel wall, penetrate, and invade across the endothelium.
You are still working on this subject area now in your
own lab?
I am. We're also expanding on it to understand how the same
sort of mechanisms regulate tumor cell migration during
metastasis. This would be during the late stages of
metastasis, when the tumor cell is circulating in the
bloodstream.
There are a lot of molecular parallels between tumor cell and leukocyte extravasation. Some of the adhesion molecules that mediate the interaction with the endothelial cells are the same. A few years ago, it also became clear that some tumor cells overexpress chemokine receptors that are normally found on leukocytes.
RIDING THE WAVES
You moved to New Orleans not long before Katrina hit the
city.
Less than a year before, yes. My husband is also a faculty
member here in the biochemistry department. We were
here for about nine months, and then the storm hit.
What happened to you when the storm hit?
We had evacuated beforehand. We were in Houston when
it hit, and then from what we saw on TV, we knew we
weren't going to be going back anytime soon. My
husband and I drove across the country to Oregon because
that's home to both of us. We just got in the car and kept
going.
What did scientists who had left New Orleans do while
they were away?
I would say most scientists who were displaced found labs
to go and stay in. Many times, people went back to places
where you already knew people, like the lab they had
been in before, or a university where you had a
collaborator. And there were a lot of offers of help
within the scientific community to help house people
temporarily.
What did you and the rest of your lab do?
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At that point I only had one research associate, and she stayed with family in Baton Rouge. Then she started working at a lab in Baton Rouge, where she had worked as an undergraduate.
How about others in your department?
For instance, Andy Catling had previously worked in
Michael Weber's lab at the University of Virginia. He
went back there, and they made space for him. He took
his whole lab and continued on with his own research
there.
Then there was Suresh Alahari. He did some collaborative work at different labs, where he was able to learn some techniques that he didn't know before. So for him it worked out almost like a sabbatical.
What were some of the logistics of getting your lab
back on its feet?
The main thing was having to replace all your reagent
stocks. We remade some, and then called up collaborators to
get some, so we didn't have to make them all from scratch.
We also had to move to new lab space. When we first came back to New Orleans, LSU was not open. So we were put up at Children's Hospital uptown in New Orleans, which is an area that did not flood. They opened space for several LSU researchers there.
In June last year, the LSU Medical School reopened, and then I moved in here. That was initially also a temporary space, and since then we've moved again. So we've actually had our lab in three different places since the storm—all in New Orleans, but still it's disruptive.
Was there any special financial support?
There was support in the form of supplements to
grants so that you could replace all of the materials
and time that you had lost. I had an American Heart
Association grant, so I got a supplement from them. People
who had NIH grants got supplements from NIH. These were
basically special funding mechanisms to help you
restore lost reagents.
What sort of delay do you think the storm cost your
research?
I would say it took until the beginning of this year to feel
like we were hitting stride again. It took that long to
feel like experiments were going as smoothly as they
should be. We got tired of replacing everything, and
then we started just replacing the things that we
needed to do certain key experiments. We built up
slowly.
The other thing that slowed us down was personnel. I had hired a post-doc, but then that was canceled because of the storm. He went someplace else. Before I even felt comfortable to try to recruit after the storm, I needed to feel sure that the situation in New Orleans was stable. I finally hired a post-doc last October, but that was essentially a year delay.
RESTORATION
Now that you're back to full strength, you are part a
small group at LSU that is interested in cell
adhesion and migration.
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We all get together every other week and have a group lab meeting. We borrow reagents, and we talk about experiments in the hallway all the time. We have some collaborative studies, but right now it's more that we're sharing ideas, as we've each got our own individual take on things. For me that makes the whole environment here good.
How is the New Orleans campus of LSU faring now,
post-storm?
All the recovery plans for the city call for developing health
care industry and biomedical research as a driver of the
economy in New Orleans. It adds to the traditional
tourism industry. There's actually been a lot of
support from the state to improve the facilities
here.
We've had the opportunity to purchase state-of-the-art equipment recently for imaging and proteomics facilities, to increase our technical capabilities. There's also a large recruiting effort, which we hope will add to our group. We've had several very talented people come through for interviews.
How is the morale of the faculty?
I think there was some natural selection. The people
who have remained here are tough and optimistic about
the future. In general the attitudes that people have
here are, I guess you could say, cautiously optimistic.
Is that how you feel as well?
Yes. I'm hoping that we're going to continue to
recruit more people, because we did lose some
faculty. I'm hopeful that we're going to keep building up on
our cell adhesion and migration group as well, because
it's a really great environment. I think we managed
to convince our families that we weren't completely
insane by staying in New Orleans!
References
- Worthylake, R.A., and K. Burridge. 2001. Curr. Opin. Cell Biol. 13:569–577.[CrossRef][Medline]
- Wittchen, E.S., et al. 2005. J. Biol. Chem.
280:11675–11682.
[Abstract/Free Full Text] - Worthylake, R.A., et al. 2001. J. Cell
Biol. 154:147–160.
[Abstract/Free Full Text] - Libby, P. 2002. Nature. 420:868–874.[CrossRef][Medline]