MCB Seminar Series: Dr. Peter Reddien, Professor and Associate Department Head, MIT Biology Member and Associate Director, Whitehead Institute Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Hosted by David Knecht
BPB 131
3:15 Refreshments, 3:30 Seminar
“The cellular and molecular basis for regeneration in planarians” Summary: The ability to regenerate missing body parts is one of the great mysteries of biology. Fate specification in a stem cell population called neoblasts and signaling from muscle guide planarian regeneration.
Peter Reddien is an Associate Professor and Associate Department Head in the Biology Department at MIT, and member of the Whitehead Institute. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from MIT in the lab of Dr. H. Robert Horvitz, was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado at the University of Utah, and joined the faculty at MIT in 2005. Dr. Reddien received Scholar Awards from the Smith, Searle, Rita Allen, and Keck Foundations, and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Reddien's laboratory studies the cellular and molecular basis for regeneration. His lab primarily studies planarians, which are flatworms that are famous for their ability to regenerate any missing body part. His lab demonstrated the existence of pluripotent adult stem cells (cNeoblasts) that endow planarians with almost unlimited regenerative abilities. The Reddien lab also identified cellular and molecular mechanisms activated at wounds and studies also identified mechanisms that instruct regeneration. They found that muscle expresses signaling molecules that constitute positional information orchestrating regeneration.
To learn more about Dr. Reddien’s research, view his abstract at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24660 and his website at http://reddienlab.wi.mit.edu/
For more information, contact: Ciara Hanlon at ciara.hanlon@uconn.edu