David Sherwood: Invasive procedures

T he passage of a single C. elegans cell through two basement membranes to connect the worm's uterus and vulva might seem an unlikely model for tumor metastasis. But David Sherwood— who fi rst characterized the process as a post-doc in Paul Sternberg's laboratory at Caltech—thinks that the system can teach us a great deal about cell invasion events in both normal development and cancer. Sherwood began his developmental biology career as a graduate student with David McClay at Duke University, studying Notch signaling in sea urchin embryos (1–3). After switching to nematodes, he discovered that a specialized gonadal cell, called the anchor cell, crosses the basement membranes separating the uterus and vulva at a specifi c stage of larval development (4). The anchor cell sends out active processes that attach to the vulval cells while remaining connected to its neighboring gonadal cells, providing a genetically and visually tractable model for examining cell invasion in vivo. It's a model that Sherwood has used to uncover the importance of the transcription factor FOS-1 for basement membrane removal (5) and, having returned to Duke to start his own laboratory in 2005, the role of netrin signaling in orienting the anchor cell to invade in the right direction (6). In a recent interview, Sherwood helped connect his own life and career, and described how making time for his outside interests keeps him anchored while he pursues further scientifi c breakthroughs. Were you always destined for a career in science? I grew up in Champaign-Urbana in Illi-nois, where my dad is a professor in the Physiology Department. He's one of my best friends—we talk every week and of course discuss science together. He has defi nitely been the biggest infl uence on my career, but I never grew up envying what he did; I didn't hang out in his laboratory and do experiments. My dad had a tough upbringing, and he wanted to make sure that we had special experiences as a family. So he'd organize a backpacking trip every summer, usually to the Wind River Range in Wyoming. Dad would hire a horse to drop off our food way beyond where most normal people would backpack. We'd hike up to where the food was and camp there for two weeks. But Dad was both clever and cruel in packing not quite enough food, so we had to catch fi sh to survive. That's …