To divide or not to divide?
Speaker Dr. Mingwei Min
Department of Biochemistry and Biofrontiers Institute, University of Colorado-Boulder  

About the Speaker
Dr. Min earned her Ph.D. degree with Dr. Cath Lindon at the University of Cambridge. She moved across the pond to do a postdoc with Dr. Dan Finley at Harvard Medical School. She then joined Dr. Sabrina Spencer’s lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder to understand how cells choose between proliferation and quiescence.  

Talk Introduction
Proper control of cellular proliferation and quiescence is fundamental to tissue homeostasis. My talk will center on two aspects of the control – how do cells interpret signals from fluctuating environments to make the proliferation-quiescence decision; and how do internal cell states influence the decision. Multi-cellular organisms use mitogens to regulate cell proliferation, yet how fluctuating mitogenic signals are converted into all-or-none proliferation-quiescence decisions is poorly understood. Here we combine live-cell imaging with temporally controlled perturbations to determine the timescale and mechanisms underlying the system. Contrary to the textbook model that cells only sense mitogen availability in G1, we find that mitogenic signaling is temporally integrated throughout the entire mother cell cycle and that cells remember a one-hour lapse in MAPK signaling for over 12 hours. Therefore we identify a cellular memory-storage system that integrates mitogenic signals over long time periods to regulate proliferation rate.  

Time: 10:00-11:00 on Nov. 27, 2019
Venue: 103 Meeting Room in Huiyuan Building  

All are welcome！