Think & Drink Talk:
Stephanie Kainrath
IST Austria, Janovjak group
When red means go and green means stop:
controlling cellular signals with optogenetics
The life of a cell is full of crucial decisions: Divide or stop dividing? Remain a stem cell or become
specialized? Stay or become migratory? And where to migrate to? Cells use receptors on their surface
to sense signaling cues in their environment, and interpret them to make a decision. Such signals work
together in networks to orchestrate highly complex events like embryogenesis or wound healing, and
need to be tightly balanced to maintain homeostasis in the adult body. In my work, I am particularly
interested in growth factors – too little of these signals, and cells will deteriorate and die, leading to
tissue damage. Too much, and they start to proliferate without control, and become cancerous.
To better understand how signals act together to induce a specific effect, optogenetic methods provide
a great tool: by re-engineering cell signaling receptors to become light-responsive, we can control or
disturb signaling to observe resulting effects with high spatial and temporal precision. This can help us
to understand how cells integrate different signals or how the same signal can lead to different outputs,
and the method can also be applied to control cellular behavior “remotely” in deeper tissue layers of an
organism.
I will talk about two recently developed receptors from our lab that can be controlled by illumination:
one can be switched on with red light, and the other can be switched off with green light.
Friday, Nov 25, 2016, 4PM
IST Austria, Raiffeisen Lecture Halls
Institute of Science and Technology Austria | Am Campus 1 | 3400 Klosterneuburg
www.ist.ac.at