NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

Black Spot, Black Death, Black Pearl: the Tales of Bacterial Effectors

The Orth lab is interested in elucidation the activity of virulence factors from pathogenic bacteria so that we can gain novel molecular insight into eukaryotic signaling systems.

Many virulence factors are secreted by bacteria using a type III secretion system (T3SS) resembling a needle-like structure that efficiently translocates effector proteins from bacteria into the cytosol of a host cell. Effectors have evolved in a manner similar to many of the viral oncogenes; a eukaryotic activity is usurped and modified by the pathogen for its own advantage.

Design for Inference: from Cells to Circuits in Biology

Aviv Regev, a computational and systems biologist, is a professor of biology at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, the Chair of the Faculty and the director of the Klarman Cell Observatory and Cell Circuits Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and co-chair of the organizing committee for the international Human Cell Atlas project. She studies the molecular circuitry that governs the function of mammalian cells in health and disease and has pioneered many leading experimental and computational methods for the reconstruction of circuits, including in single-cel

Three (Formerly) Blind Mice: Reprogramming Tissues To Be Young Again

Dr. Sinclair will present his very new research on mice, providing intriguing evidence that innovative gene therapy techniques could someday roll back the biological clock of age-related vision loss. This research was conducted with support from the National Institute on Aging and the National Eye Institute and published recently in Nature.