Spring 2015

Seminars are held at 11:30AM in Cullimore Hall, Room 611, unless noted otherwise. For questions about the seminar schedule, please contact Casey Diekman.


Date: April 28, 2015

Speaker: Takanari Inoue
Department of Cell Biology,
Johns Hopkins University

University Profile

Title: "Synthetic Cell Biology: Deconstructing and Constructing Chemotaxis and Phagocytosis"

Abstract:

Signaling events in cells are localized and rapid. They often consist of redundancy, crosstalk and feedback loops. My scientific research career to date has focused on understanding how complex signaling gives rise to intricate cellular functions in response to both intrinsic and extrinsic cues. To reveal fundamental principles of how cells sense, transduce and actuate biological information, one requires perturbation strategies that act at the right time, and faster than the signaling events of interest. However, conventional tools to probe cell signaling are generally slow and global in their effects. We therefore designed, constructed and established a series of new generation molecular actuators whose action can be inducibly triggered at specific subcellular locations of living cells in a matter of seconds. We applied one such tool based on a chemically-inducible dimerization technique to multi-task second messengers such as small GTPases and membrane lipids primarily in two biological model systems, chemotaxis and flow sensation by primary cilia. This led to the discovery of previously uncharacterized principles of their regulation of downstream processes. Based on these findings we put forth new conceptual frameworks underlying functional diversification without actuating a different signaling pathway, which at least in part answers one of the fundamental questions in cell biology: how cells achieve sophisticated information processing using a finite set of signaling molecules within a confined space. In the seminar, I will present these previous works as well as ongoing works in the field of Synthetic Cell Biology where we try to reconstitute dynamic cell functions using artificial cells.