CMCB Life Sciences Seminar: Prof. Rachel Smith-Bolton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Using Fruit Flies to Understand Tissue Regeneration"

Abstract: How regenerating tissue undergoes repatterning and ensures replacement of the correct cell types is a key open question in regeneration biology. To answer this question, we used genetic tools to induce tissue damage in Drosophila larval imaginal discs, and leveraged the power of Drosophila genetics to identify mechanisms that control patterning and cell fate after tissue repair. Using this approach, we have demonstrated that the signaling pathways and growth drivers essential for regeneration have the ability to disrupt patterning and cell fate, resulting in aberrant structures. To prevent these deleterious side effects, damaged Drosophila tissues deploy protective factors that either constrain regeneration gene expression or stabilize cell fate gene expression. Thus, growth and patterning of regenerating tissues is not the same as growth and patterning of normally developing tissues, with regeneration requiring protective factors to buffer patterning and cell fate against the destabilizing effects of tissue-repair signaling.

Join the Zoom meeting:

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78092261110?pwd=UzRqNVloSGJsczRPL0xxWmxuMEl6Zz09

Meeting ID: 780 9226 1110

Passcode: Z2mb4X