Auckland Bioengineering Institute
Joe Cursons
Doctoral Candidate
BE(Hons)
Contact details
UniServices House,
Room 617
70 Symonds Street
Auckland
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 85122
Email: j.cursons@auckland.ac.nz
Joe Cursons received a Bachelor of Engineering (Bioengineering) with First class Honors from The University of Auckland in 2006 and began his PhD degree at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute in 2007. Despite an Engineering background, Joe has a strong interest in biological systems and current experimental techniques used in molecular biology.
Joe's work focusses on how keratinocytes - the primary cell type which comprises the outermost layer of the skin, the epidermis - regulate their terminal differentiation programme. He has examined the expression and localisation of several proteins within and around the ERK branch of the MAPK cascade, across the depth of human epidermis using immunofluorescence and confocal microscopy techniques. The resulting data is being analysed using systems biology techniques such as Bayesian Network inference to identify potential signaling networks which might be involved in the regulation of keratinocyte terminal differentiation.
Project supervision
Joe's doctoral research project is supervised by:
Project links
Joe is a member of the following research projects
PhD student Joe Cursons is getting right under people’s skin: literally. Joe is investigating the cells in the outer-most layers of the skin – the epidermis – and attempting to identify changes at the molecular level which regulate tissue structure and function.
The epidermis is a multi-layered tissue. Cells in the bottom basal layer constantly replicate to produce new cells. As these cells move up through the layers, they undergo a maturation process known as terminal differentiation causing large changes in cellular biochemistry. The effect of this differentiation is illustrated by changes in cell shape, from cuboidal basal cells to very flat “fried egg”-shaped squamous cells.
Joe is studying the signalling pathways that are believed to be involved in the regulation of this terminal differentiation. Working under the guidance of ABI Principal Investigators Dr Marc Jacobs and Associate Professer Edmund Crampin, Joe is looking at how this process works within normal skin tissue, an essential step to understand the basis of diseases such as skin cancer and psoriasis.
Joe’s skin samples are obtained through collaboration with members of the Maurice Wilkins Centre. The skin samples, which mostly come from breast reduction surgery and tummy tucks, are frozen down to minus 80 ĚCelsius and cut into extremely thin sections of tissue using a cryotome.
One of the main thrusts of Joe’s research is to get information about the activation of signalling pathways within skin cells inside of their native tissue. To do that, he labels different target proteins in the skin cells with fluorescently-labelled antibodies for imaging with high-resolution confocal microscopy. He then quantifies the different expression levels of the target proteins based on the fluorescent signal emitted through the different layers of skin.
“The different proteins all have different expression patterns,” says Joe. “An advantage of this approach over flow cytometric approaches is that I can identify the sub-cellular location of my target proteins – whether expressed in the cellular cytoplasm or nucleus, for example.”
Joe measures the signal of each protein within different sub- cellular compartments and then attempts to identify the signalling networks that regulate the changes in protein expression.
“I’ve always had a strong interest in experimental work so it’s been good to learn such a wide range of techniques during my PhD. It’s also been great to go from bench top lab work all the way through to modelling because it helps you to get better insight into where the data’s coming from.”
