Dr Natalia Bulgakova

Natalia Bulgakova

Lecturer in Genetics, Genomics and Fundamental Cell Biology

School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
nbul.github.io/
Centre for Molecular Cell Biology
Centre for Evolutionary and Functional Genomics
ResearcherID ORCID Scopus X

Research

cell adhesion, cytoskeleton, intracellular trafficking, image analysis, Drosophila

Interests

My research focuses on the roles and regulation of intercellular adhesion during the development of an
organism. In the lab, we combine Drosophila melanogaster as a model and human cell lines to understand how the dynamics of the E-cadherin protein, the major component of intercellular adhesion, is controlled through intracellular trafficking and transcriptional regulation. In parallel, we investigate how the changes in this dynamics impacts cell behaviours such as proliferation, survival and signalling activities in normal development and pathology. We combine classical Drosophila genetics with human cell culture; state-of-the-art microscopy (quantitative confocal imaging, live imaging, Airyscan, STORM); and genomic and epigenomic data (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq). As these techniques produce complex datasets, we develop our own pipelines and scripts for automated imaging and next-generation sequencing data analyses. Such analyses enable reliable and reproducible information to be extracted from these datasets.