Boston Single-Cell Network Meeting

Date: 

Tuesday, May 5, 2015, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Medical School, New Research Building, Room 350, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA

Guest presenters:
Ramesh Shivdasani, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Medicine, Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

“Analysis of single mouse intestinal stem cells” 

No abstract - late addition.

and

Roshan Kumar, MD
Visiting Scholar, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
Senior Scientist, HiFiBiO

“Deconstructing transcriptional heterogeneity in pluripotent stem cells.” 

How pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) reconcile pluripotency and self-renewal is a topic of interest with relevance to both regenerative medicine and developmental biology. PSCs are capable of interconversion between distinct substates, and it has been suggested that the transcriptional dynamics driving state transitions may be fundamental to pluripotency. We set out to deconstruct the transcriptional program underlying pluripotency and systematically explore the mechanisms that give rise to population heterogeneity by performing single-cell expression profiling using RNA-seq, high-throughput QPCR, and single-molecule FISH on PSCs subjected to a variety of chemical and genetic perturbations. By doing so, we have identified classes of genes that tend to show particularly variable expression patterns in PSCs, found that expression states of some variable genes can persist through multiple cell divisions, defined patterns of co-expression structure within this variability, and highlighted a key role for miRNAs in driving distinct states of pluripotency. These data indicate that fluctuations in the expression of key pluripotency factors influence the probability of lineage regulator expression, suggesting a code connecting pluripotency network configuration to lineage bias within individual stem cells.

Food and beverage will be provided at the meeting.

Faculty organizers:  Peter Kharchenko and Lev Silberstein

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