About

Julie Theriot is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Her research explores the mechanics and dynamics of cell self-organization and movement across a variety of cells, ranging from bacteria to fish skin cells. Her work focuses on understanding how cellular structures are formed and coordinated, emphasizing the spatial and temporal organization of macromolecules within cells. Her group investigates three main areas: the actin-based motility of intracellular bacterial pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes, the whole-cell crawling of epithelial cells and leukocytes including processes like phagocytosis in macrophages, and the dynamics of cellular organization in bacteria and diatoms. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges cell biology, microbiology, and biophysics, employing both biochemical reconstitution and genetic, pharmacological, and quantitative video-based analyses to develop broad principles of cellular organization and movement.

Research topics

• Biology
• Computer Science
• Cell biology
• Genetics
• Biological system
• Materials science
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Biophysics
• Mathematics
• Food science
• Mechanics
• Nanotechnology
• Optics

Selected publications

• BPS2026 – Adherent hiPSC lumenoids: A robust 3D platform for bridging cellular dynamics, multicellular organization, and biophysical modeling

  Biophysical Journal · 2026-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• BPS2026 – A dynamical systems framework applied to live cell imaging uncovers a first-order phase transition between morphology-based cell states

  Biophysical Journal · 2026-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Galvanin (TMEM154) is an electric-field sensor for directed cell migration

  Cell · 2026-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Directed migration of immune and epithelial cells is critical for rapid responses to tissue injury or infection. Endogenous electric fields, generated by disruption of the transepithelial potential across the skin, are thought to guide cells to wound sites. However, how single cells detect these electrical cues remains unclear. We identified Galvanin (TMEM154), a poorly characterized single-pass transmembrane protein, as required for electric-field-guided migration of rapidly moving cells. Expression of Galvanin is sufficient to confer electric-field-guided migration on otherwise non-responsive epithelial cells. Upon electric-field exposure, Galvanin rapidly relocalizes to the anodal side of cells, and in human neutrophils, relocalization is immediately followed by changes in spatial patterns of cellular protrusion and retraction. These data suggest Galvanin acts as a direct sensor of the electric field, transducing spatial information about a cell's electrical environment to the intracellular migratory apparatus to support directed cell migration.

  PublisherDOI

• Intracellular pH dynamics promotes zebrafish larval tail regeneration

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-05-15

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Intracellular pH (pHi) dynamics regulates numerous cell behaviors, including migration and proliferation. While these functions are well-established in cell lines, the role of pHi changes in vivo is less well understood. We generated a transgenic zebrafish line expressing a fluorescent ratiometric pHi biosensor and identified functional changes in pHi during zebrafish larval tail regeneration. We found that tail amputation led to a transient decrease in pHi, followed by a prolonged increase in pHi above pre-amputation values. Moreover, we showed that pharmacologically inhibiting Na + /H + exchanger (NHE) activity or decreasing extracellular pH attenuated the post-amputation increase in pHi, reduced subsequent cell proliferation, and impaired tail regeneration. We further found that inhibiting NHE activity post-amputation led to elevated inflammation, disrupted myeloid cell behavior, decreased reactive oxygen species, and increased glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK3) activity. Finally, we showed that the regeneration defects in larvae with disrupted pHi were partially rescued by the GSK3 inhibitor BIO. Our data reveal a previously unrecognized role for pHi dynamics in coordinating tissue behaviors in vivo and enabling zebrafish larval tail regeneration.

  PublisherDOI

• BPS2025 - Interpretable representation learning for 3D multi-piece intracellular structures in human induced pluripotent stem cells using point clouds

  Biophysical Journal · 2025-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Using tunable hydrogel microparticles to measure cellular forces

  Nature Protocols · 2025-12-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• BPS2025 - Colony context and size-dependent compensation mechanisms give rise to variations in nuclear growth trajectories

  Biophysical Journal · 2025-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Listeria monocytogenes</i> cell-to-cell spread bypasses nutrient limitation for replicating intracellular bacteria

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-02-01 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Listeria monocytogenes is an intracellular bacterial pathogen that obtains nutrients from the mammalian host cell to fuel its replication in cytosol. Sparse infection of epithelial monolayers by L. monocytogenes results in the formation of distinct infectious foci, where each focus originates from the initial infection of a single host cell followed by multiple rounds of active bacterial cell-to-cell spread into neighboring host cells in the monolayer. We used time-lapse microscopy to measure changes in bacterial growth rate in individual foci over time and found that intracellular bacteria initially replicate exponentially, but then bacterial growth rate slows later in infection, particularly in the center of the infectious focus. We found that the intracellular replication rate of L. monocytogenes is measurably decreased by limiting host cell glucose availability, by decreasing the rate of intracellular bacterial oligopeptide import, and, most interestingly, by alterations in host cell junctional proteins that limit bacterial spread into neighboring cells without directly affecting bacterial growth or metabolism. By measuring the carrying capacity of individual host cells, we found that the nutritional density of cytoplasm is comparable to rich medium. Taken together, our results indicate that the rate of intracellular L. monocytogenes growth is governed by a balance of the rate of nutrient depletion by the bacteria, the rate of nutrient replenishment by the metabolically active host cells, and the rate of bacterial cell-to-cell spread which enables the bacteria to seek out "greener pastures" before nutrient availability in a single host cell becomes limiting.

  PublisherDOI

• Colony context and size-dependent compensation mechanisms give rise to variations in nuclear growth trajectories

  Cell Systems · 2025-05-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  To investigate how cellular variations arise across spatiotemporal scales in a population of identical healthy cells, we performed a data-driven analysis of nuclear growth variations in hiPS cell colonies as a model system. We generated a 3D timelapse dataset of thousands of nuclei over multiple days and developed open-source tools for image and data analysis and feature-based timelapse data exploration. Together, these data, tools, and workflows comprise a framework for systematic quantitative analysis of dynamics at individual and population levels, and the analysis further highlights important aspects to consider when interpreting timelapse data. We found that individual nuclear volume growth trajectories arise from short-timescale variations attributable to their spatiotemporal context within the colony. We identified a time-invariant volume compensation relationship between nuclear growth duration and starting volume across the population. Notably, we discovered that inheritance plays a crucial role in determining these two key nuclear growth features while other growth features are determined by their spatiotemporal context and are not inherited.

  PublisherDOI

• BPS2025 - Generative computational modeling with cellPACK reveals interplay between rules of intracellular organization and geometry in hiPSCs

  Biophysical Journal · 2025-02-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Actin-based motility of a bacterial pathogen

  NIH · $3.0M · 2019–2021

• NIH Grant R01AI036929

  NIH · $3.0M · 2010

• NIH Grant R01AI067712

  NIH · $1.5M · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Rikki M. Garner

  Harvard University

  81 shared

• Matthew J. Footer

  68 shared

• Daan Vorselen

  Wageningen University & Research

  45 shared

• Jané Kondev

  Brandeis University

  45 shared

• E Bastounis

  42 shared

• Ramon Lorenzo D. Labitigan

  Stanford University

  42 shared

• Andrew S. Kennard

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  40 shared

• Rob Phillips

  California Institute of Technology

  38 shared

Labs

• Theriot LabPI

Education

• B.S., Biology (Course 7), Physics (Course 8)

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1988

• Ph.D., Cell Biology

  University of California at San Francisco

  1993