Bob Cail

Background

About Bob Cail

I am a postdoctoral fellow jointly advised by Yale Goldman and Michael Ostap at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, studying the mutations in cardiac myosin that impact cardiac output in inherited cardiomyopathies. We use a combination of biochemistry, in vitro reconstitution, and high-speed optical traps to understand precise changes to myosin motor activity, from single molecules to small ensembles resembling the cardiac thick filament. During my biophysics PhD, in David Drubin's lab at UC Berkeley, I applied novel nanofabrication techniques to cell biological questions in clathrin-mediated endocytosis of genome-edited cells. In particular, I was interested in mechanisms of cell membrane curvature generation on the nanometer scale during vesicle formation. We used a combination of CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing, materials science, specialized fluorescence microscopy, and computational image processing to understand the interplay between membrane curvature and the distinct modules of endocytosis in human cultured cells.