CSB Faculty Candidate Seminar: Gavin Schlissel, PhD, Feb 3, 2025, 10 AM, Clark Auditorium.
Faculty Candidate Seminar
Gavin Schlissel, Ph.D.
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
Department of Biology, MIT
Monday, February 3, 2025
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)
Clark Auditorium
Talk Title: “Signaling across scales: Connecting single-molecule Hedgehog diffusion dynamics to evolutionary adaptation”
Talk Abstract: Animal development and physiology rely on secreted signaling proteins to transmit information and to coordinate multicellular behaviors. These signaling proteins must travel through a crowded extracellular matrix, which is composed of insoluble and heavily modified proteins. It has long been appreciated that the extracellular matrix might affect cell-cell communication, however the extracellular matrix is resistant to most legacy biochemical, structural, or genetic analysis and so it has been difficult to understand mechanistically how the extracellular matrix could influence the movement of extracellular signaling molecules. I developed in situ single-molecule microscopy approaches to understand how secreted signaling proteins move through an intact extracellular matrix in live cells and tissues. My work revealed a new model for extracellular diffusion, and identified previously unappreciated mechanisms that evolution has modulated to regulate the size of Hedgehog signaling gradients in tissue- or organism-specific ways. I will discuss my past, ongoing and future efforts to understand how signaling proteins interact with the extracellular matrix, and how those mechanisms inform our understanding of animal development, physiology and evolution.