The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Elizabeth Villa, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

To perform their function, biological systems need to operate across multiple scales. Current techniques in structural and cellular biology lack either the resolution or the context to observe the structure of individual biomolecules in their natural environment, and are often hindered by artifacts. The Villa lab's goal is to build tools that can reveal molecular structures in their native cellular environment using the power of cryo-electron tomography to image biomolecules at molecular resolution in situ. Dr. Villa will show how her lab used these techniques to discover how jumbo phage build a sequence of compartments, membrane- and protein-bound, that protect the replicating genomes to avoid host defenses while functioning akin to a eukaryotic nucleus.

Elizabeth Villa completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow and became a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014. Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and she was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021. Her lab builds tools for quantitative cell biology, using cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, cell biophysics, computational analysis, and integrative modeling. This potent combination allows them to look at macromolecular complexes in their native environment and derive their structure, context, and interaction partners. They use these tools to study biological processes in three areas: (1) unveiling key cellular processes in bacteria, with a focus on how jumbo phage infection results in bacterial compartments and a cytoskeleton not seen before in bacteria; (2) studying the molecular architecture of the nuclear periphery including the structural dynamics of the yeast nuclear pore complex, the mechanical communication between the cytoskeleton and the nucleus, and the molecular architecture of the genome and its association to the nuclear envelope; and (3) determining the in situ molecular networks of the LRRK2 protein in Parkinson’s Disease.

This FLS will take place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. We recommend virtual participants log out of VPN prior to logging in to Zoom. Please do not share the link or post on social media. This talk will be recorded for the RU community.

Open to

Tri-Institutional