Prof Susan Mango from Harvard University explains the techniques developed by her research group to track how the chromatin matures over the course of embryogenesis, which helps to understand the interplay between chromatin and the organ identity genes.
The speaker’s lab studies organ development and physiology using a simple organ, the C. elegans pharynx (or foregut), that faces the same hurdles that confront organs in more complex animals. The speaker and her research group have probed the earliest stages of organogenesis, when embryonic cells lose developmental plasticity and acquire pharyngeal fate. Their work has revealed that there are “organ identity” genes that specify organ fate regardless of the cell types within the organ (e.g. pharyngeal muscle, pharyngeal nerve, etc.). These genes encode transcription factors that establish cell fates within an evolving nuclear environment. They have begun to develop techniques to track how the chromatin matures over the course of embryogenesis and to understand the interplay between chromatin and the organ identity genes. In a second project, they are examining the formation of epithelia. They focus on the C. elegans arcade cells, which form an epithelium in the absence of the classical transmembrane proteins (i.e. cadherins, integrins) and reveal alternative pathways to initiate polarity.
About the speaker
Prof Susan Mango received her PhD from Princeton University in 1990. She has been postdoctoral research fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison from 1990 to 1995. She was Professor of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah. She is currently Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.
Prof Mango’s research focuses on organ formation using a simple organ, the C. elegans pharynx (or foregut), that nonetheless faces the same hurdles that confront organs in more complicated animals. She and her research group combine molecular genetics, genomics and cell biological approaches to address four aspects of organogenesis, including pluripotency and cell-fate acquisition, transcriptional logic of organogenesis, nutrition and post-embryonic development, and epithelial tubes. Her articles have been published in journals including Nature, Science, Cell, and PLoS Biology.
