The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Elly Tanaka, Ph.D., senior scientist, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna

Speaker bio(s)

The remarkable phenomenon of salamander limb regeneration presents an opportunity to understand how cell signaling, cell growth, and tissue patterning have been modulated over evolution to replay a developmental process in the adult context. Limb regeneration has been partitioned into three morphologically identifiable stages: wound healing, blastema growth, and blastema patterning. During this process, regeneration-competent, position-sensitive progenitors are recruited from adult tissue into a mesenchymal blastema that ultimately regenerates the appropriate portion of the limb, corresponding to the amputation site. Classical developmental morphogens found in the developing limb bud are re-deployed during regeneration but at notably larger spatial scales. Dr. Tanaka will discuss the cellular contributions to regeneration as well as the molecular functions her laboratory has identified that are being deployed to successfully regenerate a limb.

 

Dr. Tanaka has been recognized for her work rejuvenating the study of regeneration biology. By developing molecular genetics and imaging techniques in the salamander, Ambystoma mexicanum, she has defined the stem cells that undertake limb and spinal cord regeneration. She has identified the molecular pathways triggered by injury that induce cell self-renewal, patterning, and acquisition of a regenerative phenotype. More recently, Dr. Tanaka has begun applying this knowledge toward directing the morphogenesis and differentiation of mouse and human neural stem cells.

 

Dr. Tanaka earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, performing her thesis work with Dr. Lawrence S.B. Goldstein. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Francisco, where she applied digital technologies to imaging microtubules in neuronal axons in the laboratory of Dr. Marc Kirschner. She then travelled to London as a Muscular Dystrophy Society and Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow to start her studies on salamander limb regeneration with Dr. Jeremy Brockes. There, she established molecular techniques to study serum factors that induce cell cycle re-entry of regenerative salamander cells. In 1999, she became a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where she initiated live imaging and molecular genetics approaches to studying spinal cord and limb regeneration. Before joining the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, where she is a senior scientist, Dr. Tanaka was full professor of animal models of regeneration at the Technical University Dresden, DFG Research Center for Regenerative Therapies from 2008 to 2016, and director of the institute from 2014 to 2016. She was subsequently named honorary professor. She has received the Biofutures Award from the German Federal Ministry of Biotechnology and Research in 2003 and a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award in 2011. Dr. Tanaka is also a fellow of the Max Planck Society.

Open to

Public

Host

Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D.

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Justin Sloboda

Phone

(212) 327-7785

Sponsor

Justin Sloboda
(212) 327-7785
jsloboda@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=4314