Spying on the Immune System
The Philip Levine Memorial Lecture
Event Details
- Type
- Friday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Stephen Elledge, Ph.D., Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital; professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Speaker bio(s)
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The immune system is a highly complex cellular network capable of recognizing an enormous diversity of pathogens and disabling them to provide long-lasting protection against reinfection. Understanding immune function requires detailed knowledge of the pathogen epitopes it recognizes. The Elledge lab has developed powerful technologies, including VirScan, to comprehensively map the epitopes targeted by the B-cell arm of the immune system. In this talk, Dr. Elledge will explore how immune responses evolve over time and how the underlying architecture of antibody generation gives rise to recurring patterns of epitope recognition, known as immunodominance, and discuss the implications of these patterns for viral evolution.
Stephen Elledge is the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His group develops genetic tools to probe biological systems. He has made contributions to diverse fields including cell cycle control, how cells sense structural alterations in DNA and signal to orchestrate complex responses to DNA damage and replication stress, how signaling regulates protein stability through modular E3 ubiquitin ligases, how aneuploidy drives tumorigenesis, and how methods that allow identification of epitopes recognized by the immune system can inform us about the history of infection, causality of disease, targets of autoimmunity and the structure of the immune system. For these studies he has been awarded a number of prizes including the Gruber Prize, the Breakthrough Prize and the Lasker.
- Open to
- Tri-Institutional