Stefanie Seifert

Endothelial cells line vessel walls and control the transition of water
and plasma proteins between blood and the underlying tissue. Dynamic
remodelling of the endothelial cytoskeleton tightly regulates vascular
permeability. The main focus of my PhD project is to study the functions
of Enabled/Vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (Ena/VASP) proteins in
the endothelium and especially in the regulation of vascular
permeability. The three mammalian proteins of this family, VASP, Mena,
and EVL, are important mediators of cytoskeleton remodeling, linking
cyclic nucleotide signaling pathways to different modes of actin
(re)organization, including actin filament assembly, cross-linking, and
bundling. Ena/VASP proteins share a common domain structure and can
mutually compensate each other, however, the loss of all three proteins
is lethal, since they are crucial for endothelial cell-cell adhesion and
can thus play an important role in endothelial barrier permeability.
To study the functions of Ena/VASP proteins I’m using molecular and cell
biological methods, but also an animal model, that allows inducible,
endothelium specific expression of a certain VASP domain.