Scholar Profile

Alan D. Bender

Associate Professor
Department of Biology
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Voice: 812-855-0689
Fax: 812-855-6705
Email: abender@bio.indiana.edu
Personal Homepage
1992 Searle Scholar

Research Interests

Rho-type GTPases

Rho-type GTPases control the spatial organization of cytoskeletal and signaling proteins in eukaryotic cells. Our lab is using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to investigate the following questions concerning Rho-type GTPases:

What are their targets and regulators?
How do they choose among different potential targets in different situations?
How are they activated and localized to the appropriate places at the correct times in the cell cycle?
How are the actions of different Rho-type GTPases coupled?

The tools that we use to address these questions are biochemistry, molecular biology, microscopy, genetics, and two-hybrid analysis.