An omics journey through the intriguing world of adipose biology
Event details
| Date | 15.02.2019 |
| Hour | 12:30 › 13:30 |
| Speaker | Dr Bart Deplancke, FSV / IBI / UPDEPLA |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract :
Given the world-wide increase in obesity, studying the onset of this debilitating syndrome and specifically the dynamic nature of fat tissue is of great interest. In this presentation, I intend to summarize my lab’s efforts in addressing multiple, outstanding questions related to adipose biology. First, I will show how we are using integrative genomic approaches to better understand the transcriptional networks that drive terminal fat cell differentiation, highlighting several studies that allowed us to uncover novel, central regulators of this process. Second, I will demonstrate the power of single cell transcriptomics in allowing us to acquire a high-resolution snapshot of adipose stromal cell heterogeneity, revealing several distinct subpopulations. Surprisingly, we found that one subpopulation is not only refractory to adipogenesis, but also exhibits a remarkable capacity to inhibit in vitro and in vivo mammalian adipocyte formation. The discovery of these adipogenesis-regulatory cells (“Aregs”) is significant as it may fundamentally change our thinking of how the composition and plasticity of fat depots is regulated. Finally, I will discuss our latest efforts in better understanding the genetic and molecular determinants underlying adipose-related human traits. I will thereby introduce the concept of “variable chromatin modules” that we have recently coined and show how this concept can assist us in uncovering the flow of molecular information from regulatory variant to adipose-related phenotype.
Bio :
Bart Deplancke graduated as a Biochemical Engineer at Ghent University (Belgium, 1998) after which he pursued doctoral studies in Immunobiology at the University of Illinois (USA). Thereafter, he engaged in postdoctoral, regulatory genomics work in the laboratories of Marc Vidal and Marian Walhout (Harvard and UMass Medical Schools respectively) during which he developed a now patented, high-throughput protein-DNA interaction screening approach. To establish his own lab at the EPFL at the end of 2007 where he is now a tenured Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of Innovation, he decided to continue developing new experimental and computational approaches to answer questions related to the biology of the genome. The Deplancke Lab has by now built a sizeable toolkit, involving microfluidics, high-throughput sequencing, and single cell genomics, to address questions pertaining to the origin, diversity and function of stromal cells in adipose tissue as well as to how genomic variation affects molecular and organismal diversity with a specific focus on metabolic phenotypes. In 2013, he also became a Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Group Leader and in 2017, he was elected to the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- SV Faculty
Contact
- M. Mary, Dr H. Hirling