The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Special Seminar Series

Speaker(s)

Olivier Pourqui, Ph.D., professor, Strasbourg University Medical School; group leader, Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, European Center for Research on Biology and Medicine

Speaker bio(s)

In vertebrate embryogenesis, body skeletal muscles, the axial skeleton and the dermis of the back derive from the segmented somites that form periodically from the presomitic mesoderm. The Pourquié lab provided the first evidence of the existence of a molecular oscillator — the segmentation clock — associated to the rhythmic production of the segmented musculo-skeletal precursors (the somites) in the embryo. This oscillator controls a complex signaling network involving the Notch, Wnt and FGF pathways. In humans, mutations in genes associated with the segmentation clock result in abnormal segmentation of the vertebral column. They demonstrated that the spatial translation of the clock pulsation into the vertebral prepattern is controlled by traveling gradients involving FGF signaling. They also demonstrated that body axis elongation is controlled by the same FGF gradient and proposed that tissue elongation is an emergent property arising from the collective regulation of graded, random cell motion of presomitic mesoderm cells. Their work also identified unexpected functions for Hox genes in the regulation of cell ingression during gastrulation. Together, studies from the Pourquié lab have helped explain how the cross talk between the segmentation clock and the Hox clock accounts for the diversity of vertebral formulae across animal species. Together, their discoveries have had important consequences for our understanding of the patterning of the vertebrate embryonic axis and provided a conceptual framework to explain human spine malformations. Their recent research aims at generating presomitic mesoderm in vitro from pluripotent cells to analyze developmental and pathological processes in human cells and to serve as the basis for future cell based therapies for musculo-skeletal diseases.

 

Dr. Pourquié received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the National Agronomic Institute of Paris-Grignon, where his thesis advisor was Nicole Le Douarin. He also received a diploma of agronomic engineering there in 1988 and a diploma of general microbiology in 1988 from Institut Pasteur. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Embryology at the National Center for Scientific Research at the College of France, near Paris. From 1999 to 2002 he was a director of research with the National Center for Scientific Research, and from 2002 to 2009 Dr. Pourquié worked at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, first as associate investigator, then investigator. Dr. Pourquié was an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2005 to 2009, and research director at INSERM from 2009 to 2011. He was director at the Institute for Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in France from 2009 to 2012 and has been a group leader there since 2009. Dr. Pourquié joined Strasbourg University Medical School as professor in 2011. He is the editor-in-chief of Development and was the editor-in-chief of Current Topics in Developmental Biology from 2007 to 2011 and is a past president of the French Society for Developmental Biology. Dr. Pourquié is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and Academia Europea and has been honored with the Richard Lounsbery Grand Prize of the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, the Allianz Grand Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and a European Research Council advanced grant.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 2:45 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., Lower Level Greenberg Building (CRC)

Contact

Jill Benz

Phone

(212) 327-7244

Sponsor

Jill Benz
(212) 327-7244
benzj@rockefeller.edu