Cooperation of motors microtubule in cell division
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Cooperation of motors microtubule in cell division
Wed, 30/06/2021 - 13:30 to 14:30
Location:
Speaker:
Julie Welburn
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Synopsis:
To maintain their genomic integrity, eukaryotic cells must replicate their DNA faithfully and distribute it equally to the daughter cells. Mitotic defects lead to aneuploidy and cancer. The segregation of chromosomes is mediated by the mitotic spindle, assembled from dynamic microtubules and motors. These motors play key roles in microtubule organization during cell division. However, the reductionist approach to studying these motors in isolation is not sufficient to understand their function in the cellular context. Our aim to define how the activities of individual motors, their interacting regulatory networks and the microtubule tracks themselves cooperate and respond to each other to generate physiological cellular function such as chromosome segregation. I will give an overview of our work into the molecular mechanism of mitotic motors and discuss our recent work revealing that two kinesins cooperate to depolymerize microtubules in mitosis.
Biography:
Julie did her PhD in Structural Biology of the regulation of cell cycle complexes in the LMB, University of Oxford with Prof Jane Endicott and Prof Martin Noble. She spent one year in Eva Nogales's laboratory at UC Berkeley to further study mitotic protein complexes by electron microscopy. She joined the Cheeseman lab, at the Whitehead Institute and MIT, Boston, in 2008 to pursue cell biology and biochemical studies on mitosis. Julie received a CRUK research career development and moved in April 2012 to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, Edinburgh to start the lab and study the molecular basis for motors in cell division. Since August 2018, she is Wellcome Senior Fellow. In 2019, she was also selected as an EMBO Young investigator. Her lab uncovers mechanisms of microtubule-based molecular transport and how cargos, motors and tracks cooperate to build cellular structures and ensure correct cell function.