Professor Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis
Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, US

Date: Tuesday, 24-September-2019
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Venue: Seminar Room 1, G/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong​

Summary:
The mammalian preimplantation embryo is the site of a bona fide pluripotent cell population, the epiblast, and it is also the source of embryonic stem (ES) cells. The preimplantation period is a paradigm of self-organization and regulative development; embryos can develop normally in vitro without the need for extrinsic factors, and they can recover from experimental manipulations, including the removal or addition of cells. The pluripotent epiblast and its sister lineage, the primitive endoderm, arise from a common progenitor population, the Inner Cell Mass, within the developing blastocyst. These blastocyst lineages are generated in precise proportions within a short period of time, suggesting the existence of mechanisms controlling tissue size, a feature critical for normal organismal development and homeostasis. To delineate the mechanistic control and coordination of cell fate specification and tissue scaling events in vivo they are using genetic, embryological and optogenetic manipulations, combined with single-cell resolution quantitative imaging and genomic analyses. The speaker will discuss recent results which provide insight into how individual cell fate decisions are regulated at the population level in the mouse blastocyst, and how embryos can accommodate perturbations.

ALL ARE WELCOME