NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

Understanding the source of regenerative ability in animals

Salamanders and starfish might be “simpler” than humans, but they far surpass us in one major way—the ability to regenerate tissues and regrow lost limbs. Dr. Sánchez Alvarado studies regeneration using the flatworm planaria Schmidtea mediterranea. Remarkably, when halved or quartered (even by high school students) this organism can clone itself from the pieces. More than 100 years ago, that feat captured the attention of geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, who studied planarians years before his famed work on fruit flies. 

Genes controlling sleep and circadian rhythms

The Young lab studies 24-hour circadian clocks, which time the recurring, daily activities observed in most organisms. These cellular clocks are active in most animal tissues and establish daily rhythms in physiology and behavior. The lab’s findings have implications for sleep and mood disorders as well as for dysfunctions related to the timing of gene activities underlying visual functions, locomotion, metabolism, immunity, learning, and memory.

Travelling through tissues one cell at a time: the Human Cell Atlas and barrier tissues

Dr. Teichmann's group seeks to elucidate general principles of gene expression and protein complex assembly. Her lab is trying to understand how changes in cell state are regulated at the transcriptomic and epigenetic levels by studying the differentiation of mouse T helper (Th) cells and embryonic stem cells (mESC) at the single cell level. Her lab uses and develops both computational and experimental approaches in the field of single cell genomics to address our questions.