Date: Friday, 1 March 2019

Venue: Seminar Room 4, G/F
Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
21 Sassoon Road, Hong Kong

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Title: Molecular and Functional kinetics of mesenchymal stem cells differentiated from patient iPSCs and SCNT-ESCs with premature ageing
Speaker: Miss GAO Ge (PhD candidate)

Summary:
Patient-specific pluripotent stem cells can be generated via nuclear reprogramming with YAMANAKA factors (iPSCs) or by somatic nuclear transfer (SCNT-ESCs). However, molecular and functional features of differentiated cells with different reprogramming mechanism remains to be evaluated. Here, we focused on premature aging HGPS caused by heterozygous C1824T point mutation in LMNA that leading to a detrimental accumulation of progerin, an aberrant form of nuclear structural protein Lamin A. Thus, we generated HGPS patient-specific iPSCs and NT-ESCs, differentiated them to mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) which can recapitulate aging-related phenotypes and compared these MSCs in normal physiological process and in response to stress. This work builds up stem cell based drug screening platform for premature aging intervention and provides promise for ideal cell therapy in regenerative medicine.

Title: Dissecting the interaction between endocytic adaptors and RGD-binding integrin receptors
Speaker: Miss LIU Xiaoting (PhD candidate)

Summary:
Integrins are heterodimeric transmembrane receptors which bridge extracellular matrices to actin cytoskeleton and facilitate adhesion formation. The oligomerization and disassembly of integrins are important in cell migration and tissue organization. Previously, we reported that clathrin-mediated endocytosis adaptor protein Dab2 is recruited to activated integrin- beta3 on RGD membrane while is absent in activated integrin-beta1. In spite of high similarity of cytoplasmic domains among integrin beta subunits, the mechanism of distinct Dab2 recruitment between integrin-beta3 and integrin-beta1 remains unclear. Our results show that wild type integrin beta subunits have different ability in Dab2 recruitment which is altered in domain-swapping between integrin-beta3 and integrin-beta1. In particular, the membrane distal NPxY domain of integrin-beta3 plays an important role in Dab2 recruitment. In the future, we will expand our domain-swapping work to other integrin beta subunits. Besides, we will focus our work in studying the role of integrin cytoplasmic tail in adhesion transformation and the impact of integrin endocytosis during cell migration.

ALL ARE WELCOME