Replaying Germinal Center Evolution
Graduate Student Recruitment Lecture
Event Details
- Type
- Friday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Gabriel Victora, Ph.D., Laurie and Peter Grauer Professor, head, Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Speaker bio(s)
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The average affinity of antigen-specific antibodies increases dramatically over the course of an immune response. This process, known as affinity maturation, arises through a Darwinian process in which B lymphocytes undergo iterative cycles of stochastic hypermutation in their immunoglobulin genes, followed by selective expansion of clones that acquire affinity-enhancing mutations. These evolutionary dynamics unfold within highly dynamic microanatomical structures called germinal centers, which form in secondary lymphoid organs after infection or immunization. The Victora lab's recent work combines imaging and mouse genetics, deep mutational scanning, and quantitative approaches to reveal antibody affinity maturation as a bona fide evolutionary process embedded within our lymph nodes.
Gabriel D. Victora is the Laurie and Peter Grauer Professor and head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics at Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Immunology from the New York University Medical School in 2011. From 2012 to 2016, he was a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Work in the Victora lab combines mouse genetics and microscopy to study the clonal and cellular dynamics of the antibody response, with particular focus on how B cells respond to immunization and infection.
- Open to
- Tri-Institutional