学术报告
报告题目：Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms Controlling Airway Branching Morphogenesis
报告人：Nan Tang, M.D., Ph.D.
Dept. of Anatomy and Program in Developmental Biology, University of California, San Francisco
时间：Tuesday 9:30 a.m., March 13
地点：生命科学学院411会议室
An important challenge facing medicine is to understand how different cellular processes function and coordinate during normal organ development. The mouse embryonic lung, in which airway branching morphogenesis is a strikingly stereotypic process, is an attractive model to study the cellular and molecular controls in organogenesis. I have investigated the mechanisms that control the morphology of airway epithelial tubes. My study demonstrated that the RAS-regulated ERK1/2 signaling plays a key role in regulating airway shape by influencing mitotic spindle orientation in embryonic airway epithelial cells. By using a mathematical model, for the first time we quantitatively showed that mitotic spindle angle distributions are sufficient to explain airway shape changes in both normal lungs and mutant lungs with increased ERK1/2 signaling in epithelium. These findings thus allow us to link a molecular and cellular event, ERK1/2 signaling regulated mitotic spindle orientation, with a large-scale morphogenetic process during development.
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