CRM External Seminar: Tristan Rodriguez, Group leader, National Heart & Lung Institute, Imperial College London, UK

Talk title

Cell competition and how cells deal with their stressed neighbours.

Host

Sally Lowell

Abstract

The onset of differentiation in mammals involves a vast array of cellular changes, including a rewiring of the transcriptional, epigenetic, metabolic and signalling networks that control cell identity. The dimension of these changes, and the requirement for their timing to be carefully orchestrated, implies that stringent quality control mechanisms must be in place to ensure the elimination of damaged cells prior to the specification of the germline. Over the last few years, cell competition, a fitness quality control that eliminates cells that are less fit than their neighbours, has emerged as one such quality control. Here I will present the work that my laboratory has done to characterise the importance of cell competition during early mammalian development, and I will discuss the possibility that it has emerged from a metabolic communication between stressed and non-stressed cells in a tissue.

Bio

Tristan Rodriguez is a Professor in Cell and Developmental biology in the Cardiac Function section of the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London. Tristan did his PhD and post-doc at the National Institute for Medical Research (UK) working first on mouse genetics and then on early mouse development. He continued the latter interest as a Lister Institute of Medicine fellow at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre (UK). In 2011 the Rodriguez laboratory moved to NHLI where the research of his group focuses on understanding the mechanisms that control cell fitness.  Specifically, the Rodriguez group studies the selective pressures that act to remove suboptimal cells from the mammalian embryo.