Events Calendar

Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

Speaker: Leonard Morsut, PhD, Assistant Professor, Broad CIRM Center and Dept. of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine

Talk Title: Programming cells to build tissues with synthetic biology molecular tools: a new pathway towards engineering development and regeneration

Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

Abstract: During embryonic development, complex multicellular tissues form based on genetically encoded algorithms that specify how cells will behave both individually and collectively.

In the Tissue Development Engineering Laboratory we develop synthetic biology approaches to implement in cells such self-organization programs and understand their overall logic, both for basic understanding and applications in regenerative medicine.

We have recently engineered and characterized a family of orthogonal cell-cell communication pathways, inspired by the mechanism of an endogenous communication system called Notch, which allows a cell to detect molecular signals from its neighbors and, in response, to induce user-specified transcriptional programs. These synthetic Notch pathways do not crosstalk with native pathways or with each other, thus providing multiple novel channels for engineering cell-cell communication. I will show how we used these synthetic pathways to flexibly construct basic routines for multi-cellular patterning and morphogenesis in mammalian cellular systems, e.g. localized differentiation, spatial patterning and Boolean decisions. Then, using the synthetic pathways in combination with adhesion molecules we designed a series of synthetic morphogenetic programs in 3D spheroids that deterministically drive spatial reorganization and symmetry breaking in a dynamic, self-organized fashion; we show that these trajectories are robust to perturbations and capable of self-regeneration. I will discuss possible applications of these technologies for developmental biology and regenerative medicine research and applications, especially in combination with tissue engineering tools and approaches. With the increasingly sophisticated synthetic biology components available today and the developments of tissue engineering we are going towards the possibility of designing the development of functional tissues in a dish with user-defined high level properties like shape, resistance to injury, regeneration, for the next generation of regenerative medicine applications.


Biography: http://morsutlab.usc.edu/

Host: Brent Liu, PhD

Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta