Sabrina Spencer

Education:

B.S. in Biology & B.A. in French Literature, The George Washington University
M.S. in Human Genetics, University of Michigan
Graduate Student, Computational and Systems Biology PhD Program, MIT

Advisor:

Professor Peter Sorger

Primary collaborator:

John Albeck (Sorger lab)

Research focus:

Cells in isogenic populations display significant variability in their fate after stimulation with TNF-family ligands; many cells die at different times, and some cells do not die at all. Cell pedigree analysis reveals that there is an important deterministic component to death time variability, i.e. one that arises from distributed initial conditions among cells. Using live-cell microscopy with fluorescent reporters, we have further dissected the molecular events underlying cell-to-cell variability and have found that the interface of caspase-8 activity and mitochondrial permeabilization is of particular importance. Combining these data with a formalized differential equation model of the Bcl-2 family "rheostat", we identify unexpected complexities in the kinetic regulation of mitochondrial permeabilization.

Homepage:

http://www.mit.edu/~spencers

Publications:

Spencer SL, Gerety RA, Pienta KJ, Forrest S (2006) Modeling Somatic Evolution in Tumorigenesis. PLoS Computational Biology 2(8).

Spencer, S.L., Berryman, M.J., García, J.A., Abbott, D. 2004. An ordinary differential equation model for the multistep progression to cancer. Journal of Theoretical Biology 231, 515-524.