Dynamics and robustness of developmental signaling

Date

Sep 14, 2023

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker

Stanislav Shvartsman

Affiliation

Department of Molecular Biology,Princeton University,Princeton, NJ, USA

Series

MPI-CBG Thursday Seminar

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Ivo Sbalzarini

Description

Successful control of biological systems hinges on understanding their responses to both external stimuli and mutations. Our work along these lines focuses on the highly conserved Extracellular signal Regulated Kinase (ERK) cascade. Our research strategy relies on increasingly precise perturbations of this cascade in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which was instrumental in delineating key signaling systems. The first set of results is related to the large-scale effects of acute optogenetic pulses of ERK activation. Our phosphoproteomic analysis of the effects of these pulses revealed that ERK signaling controls synchrony of the cleavage cell cycles. The second set of results comes from work with flies that have been gene-edited to harbor deleterious mutations identified in humans. Our statistical analysis of defects in the ERK-dependent anatomical features in these flies suggests that part of the phenotypic heterogeneity in developmental abnormalities associated with deregulated ERK signaling is of stochastic origin. The presented approaches to studying signaling systems’ responses to static and dynamic perturbations promise to improve our chances of their control in a wide range of biomedical applications.

Last modified: Sep 15, 2023, 7:35:53 AM