Forest White

Forest White

Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering Email: Office: 56-787 Phone: Administrative Assistant: Marcia Weir

Ph.D. Analytical Chemistry • 1997 Florida State University

Research Summary

The focus of research in the White lab is to understand the signaling networks connecting exogenous cellular stimulation and downstream cellular response. In oreder to link stimulation and response, it is necessary to interrogate a variety of perturbation conditions while quantifying phosphorylation-mediated signaling networks. To enable these large-scale analyses, we have recently developed a methodology which provides quantification of the level of phosphorylation for up to several hundred sites simultaneously, with comparison of up to 4 conditions in a single analysis. We have used this methodology to investigate the temporal response to EGF stimulation of human mammary epithelial cells (HMECs), the temporal response to insulin stimulation of 3T3-L1 adipocytes, and the response to CD3, CD28, or CD3 and CD28 co-stimulation in T cells.

One of the projects in the lab has been to investigate human mammary epithelial cells (HMECs), both parental HMECs and HMECs stably retrovirally transfected to overexpress HER2. We have quantified tyrosine phosphorylation-mediated signaling networks in these 2 cell lines following EGF or HRG stimulation at 4 different time points. In collaboration with the Lauffenburger lab, we have used computational modeling to correlate this quantitative mass spectrometry based phosphoproteomic data set to both proliferation and migration, yielding weighted correlation values for each phosphorylation site and time point to both migration and proliferation.

We are currently expanding the application of this methodology to a variety of different systems, with the goal of establishing quantitative models defining the signaling networks linking stimulation and response in multiple systems, including collaborative efforts with the Sorger, Lauffenburger, Yaffe, Wittrup, and Tannenbaum labs here at MIT.