Towards Engineering Developmental Biology: a New Family of Synthetic Cell-Cell Communication Pathways to Control Multicellular Self-Organization
Event details
| Date | 07.12.2015 |
| Hour | 11:00 |
| Speaker | Leonardo Morsut, Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco, CA (USA) |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
BIOENGINEERING SEMINAR
Abstract:
During development, complex multicellular structures form based on genetically encoded algorithms that specify how cells will collectively interact and regulate each other’s fate. I am developing synthetic biology approaches to write such self-organization programs and understand their overall logic. The ability to systematically program the formation of multicellular assemblies (e.g. tissues, organs, cell therapy) holds great promise for applications in regenerative medicine.
Towards this goal, we have been developing new molecular tools that allow one to rewire and reprogram cell-cell communication. We have recently engineered a family of orthogonal cell-cell communication pathways, inspired by the mechanism of notch/delta, which allow a cell to detect molecular signals from its neighbors and, in response, induce user-specified transcriptional programs. These pathways do not cross-talk with native pathways or with each other, thus providing multiple novel channels for cell-cell communication. We show that these pathways can be used to flexibly construct new multi-cellular programs – they can direct localized differentiation, self-sorting behaviors, and complex pattern formation in epithelial layers. The synthetic receptor platform at the core of these pathways represents a novel set of control points that I plan to exploit to guide self-organization of multicellular ensembles in structural and functional tissues with user-defined high level properties e.g. shape, resistance to injury, regeneration.
Bio:
2012 – current: UC San Francisco, Postdoctoral scholar, Cellular and molecular pharmacology (Wendell Lim Lab)
2005 – 2011: Università degli Studi di Padova, Bachelor of Science (BS), Mathematics
2007 – 2010: Università degli Studi di Padova, PhD, Genetics and molecular biology of development
1999 – 2004: Università degli Studi di Padova, BS and MS, Medical biotechnology
Abstract:
During development, complex multicellular structures form based on genetically encoded algorithms that specify how cells will collectively interact and regulate each other’s fate. I am developing synthetic biology approaches to write such self-organization programs and understand their overall logic. The ability to systematically program the formation of multicellular assemblies (e.g. tissues, organs, cell therapy) holds great promise for applications in regenerative medicine.
Towards this goal, we have been developing new molecular tools that allow one to rewire and reprogram cell-cell communication. We have recently engineered a family of orthogonal cell-cell communication pathways, inspired by the mechanism of notch/delta, which allow a cell to detect molecular signals from its neighbors and, in response, induce user-specified transcriptional programs. These pathways do not cross-talk with native pathways or with each other, thus providing multiple novel channels for cell-cell communication. We show that these pathways can be used to flexibly construct new multi-cellular programs – they can direct localized differentiation, self-sorting behaviors, and complex pattern formation in epithelial layers. The synthetic receptor platform at the core of these pathways represents a novel set of control points that I plan to exploit to guide self-organization of multicellular ensembles in structural and functional tissues with user-defined high level properties e.g. shape, resistance to injury, regeneration.
Bio:
2012 – current: UC San Francisco, Postdoctoral scholar, Cellular and molecular pharmacology (Wendell Lim Lab)
2005 – 2011: Università degli Studi di Padova, Bachelor of Science (BS), Mathematics
2007 – 2010: Università degli Studi di Padova, PhD, Genetics and molecular biology of development
1999 – 2004: Università degli Studi di Padova, BS and MS, Medical biotechnology
Practical information
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- Free