CANCELLED

Professor Bertie Gottgens
Professor of Molecular Haematology, University of Cambridge, UK
Deputy Director and Principal Investigator
Wellcome & MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, UK

Date: Monday, 19-August-2019
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Venue: Seminar Room 7, LG1/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong​

Summary:
The generation of cellular diversity is a hallmark of metazoan life. Across the animal kingdom, gastrulation represents a key developmental event during which embryonic pluripotent cells diversify into lineage-specific precursor cells that will generate the adult organism. Professor Gottgens’ group have generated the transcriptional profiles of 116,312 single cells from mouse embryos collected at nine sequential time-points ranging from 6.5 to 8.5 days post-fertilisation. Professor Gottgens will report their efforts to reconstruct a molecular map of cellular differentiation from pluripotency towards all major embryonic lineages, and explore the complex events involved in the convergence of visceral and primitive streak-derived endoderm. Furthermore, he will demonstrate how combining temporal and transcriptional information permits unique insights into the function of specific genes by single-cell profiling of chimeric embryos. Finally, he will describe single cell maps of open chromatin for over 17,000 single mouse embryo cells, which reveal mechanistic insights into cell type specification during early organogenesis. Taken together, this comprehensive delineation of mammalian cell differentiation processes in vivo represents a baseline for understanding the effects of gene mutations during development as well as a critical step for the optimisation of in vitro differentiation protocols for regenerative medicine.

ALL ARE WELCOME