Gantas joined the lab in 2012 as a MSc student and stayed as a PhD student. He defended his PhD in 2016 and he is now post-doc. His work focuses on the role of the E3 ubiquitin Neuralized (and of its inhibitors of the Bearded family) in apical constriction during gastrulation of the early fly embryo. Gantas has developped live imaging and quantitative image analysis approaches to study the role of Neuralized in this process. Gantas is also looking for the molecular targets of Neuralized that are involved in the Notch-independent functions of Neuralized. He recently found that Neuralized regulates the endocytosis of the poalrity protein Crumbs via specific isoforms of Stardust, a conserved adaptor protein of the core Crumbs complex (G. Perez-Mockus et al., J. Cell Biology, 2017). Gantas defended his PhD thesis in september 2016 and is currently doing a short post-doc to finish up his work.
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