NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

POSTPONED – Dynamic organelle shape and function during herpesvirus infection

Research in the Cristea laboratory focuses on characterizing mechanisms of cellular defense against viruses, as well as mechanisms used by viruses to manipulate these critical cellular processes. Towards these goals, her lab has promoted the integration of virology with proteomics and bioinformatics. The development of methods for studying virus-host protein interactions in space and time during the progression of an infection has allowed her group to bridge developments in mass spectrometry to important findings in virology.

POSTPONED – Knowing right from wrong (protein conformation): the challenging choices of (molecular) chaperones

Judith Frydman is a professor in the Departments of Biology and Genetics at Stanford University. She is originally from Argentina, where she majored in Chemistry and received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. She carried out her postdoctoral training with Ulrich Hartl at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, where she had two major contributions to the field of cellular protein folding.

POSTPONED – Stem cells growing up and finding their niche

Stem cells have the ability to self renew or differentiate and this is controlled by the environment or the niche. By understanding the RNA expression and chromatin structure of endothelial cells that stimulate blood stem cells, we have been able to fully reconstruct an ectopic stem cell niche in vivo. Blood stem cells are attracted to the ectopic sites and divide. Stem cells expand in clones and we have developed a system to barcode each stem cell and follow cell fate. Mutations in epigenetic regulators associated with aging establish clonal dominance in the blood.