2018 Fall Symposium & Business Meeting

Join NESM for our annual Fall Symposium & Business Meeting on Thursday, November 15 at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA! The meeting will consist of four technical talks, a forty minute round of lightning talks, a coffee break, a buffet dinner, and a business meeting in which elections will be held for several positions on the Board of Directors. Election ballots will be distributed with the Fall E-Newsletter.

Meeting Schedule

12:45pm-Registration 

1:30pm-Welcome Remarks

1:40pm-Guillaume Duclos (Brandeis University) Bend instability and defect loops in 3D active nematics

2:20pm-Allyson Sgro (Boston University) Who Said To Do That? Understanding Multicellular Decision Making

3:00pm-Coffee Break

3:30pm-Lightning Talks:

Christian Bowman-Colin (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) A fluorescent assay for DNA double strand break repair choice

Tzer Han Tan (MIT) Emergence of topological turbulence in membrane spiral waves   

Rey Aguilar Lopez (Brandeis University) Species-specific functions of Twinfilin in actin filament depolymerization 

Achini Opathalage (Boston University) Self-organized dynamics of confined active nematics

4:10pm-Coffee Break

4:40pm-John Godleski (Harvard University) Identifying Foreign particulate in Human Tissues

5:20pm-Ankur Jain (Whitehead Institute/MIT) RNA aggregation and neurodegenerative disease

6:00pm-Buffet Dinner

7:00pm-Business Meeting

7:50pm-Closing remarks

Additional Speaker Information:

Guillaume Duclos

“Bend instability and defect loops in 3D active nematics”

Active nematics describes a phase of matter where active particles that consume energy to produce mechanical work assemble at high density in a state with orientational order but no positional order. In this talk, I will show how the active nematic framework allows us to better understand aspects of the collective behaviors that emerge in bio-inspired materials. In particular, I will present our recent efforts to describe the emergence of flows in biomimetic 3D active gels and 3D active liquid crystals. Although most out-of-equilibrium collective phenomena in living cells and their potential engineering applications take place in complex 3D environments, majority of the experimental and theoretical work exploring self-organization of active biological materials has been restricted to 2D systems. Here, I will explore how active fluids composed of biological polymers and molecular motors behave and self-organize in 3D. I will first describe the generic bend instability that emerges in a flow-aligned 3D active gel and show how the interplay between activity, nematic elasticity and confinement controls the wavelength of this activity driven instability. I will then present current work on the emergence of flows and topological defect loops in 3D with a system composed of a passive colloidal liquid crystal doped with active microtubules.

 

Bio:

Dr. Guillaume Duclos received his B.Sc in physics and M.Sc in theoretical physics of complex systems from the Pierre and Marie Curie University - ENS. He then went on to receive his PhD in physics from the Curie institute in Paris for work on active cellular nematic. Dr. Duclos was a Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University working with Dr. Zvonimir Dogic, and is starting his own lab that will focus on soft condensed matter physics, active matter and out-of-equilibrium statistical physics, dynamics of complex fluids, self-organization and collective behaviors, as well as the biophysics of tissue morphogenesis and cell mechanics. 

 

Allyson Sgro

“Who Said To Do That? Understanding Multicellular Decision Making”

Cells work together and make decisions in systems ranging from neuronal networks to cancer tumors to bacterial biofilms.  One of the major challenges in understanding in how these decisions are made is in identifying how single cells communicate with one another and interpret their collective communications.  Using new optical tools for visualizing and controlling intra- and intercellular communication in the social amoeba, we can shed some light on how cells coordinate their behaviors.

 

Bio:

Dr. Sgro is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.  She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Washington and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Princeton University where she focused on applying microscopy and microfluidics to understanding how individual cells can collectively synchronize their intracellular signaling.  She is the recipient an NIH NRSA and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface.  Her lab is focused on quantifying and controlling intra- and intercellular signaling dynamics used to coordinate multicellular decision making.

 

John Godleski

“Identifying Foreign particulate in Human Tissues”

The identification of foreign particulate material in human tissues is important in confirming exposure to materials associated with the development of malignant tumors and other disease processes. Several approaches have been used for this identification including Polarized light microscopy (PLM), tissue digestion followed by isolation of particulate material and specific elemental composition identification by Transmission or Scanning electron microscopy (TEM or SEM) coupled with energy dispersive X-ray analyses (EDX) and/or X-ray diffraction, and in situ identification of particles or fibers in the tissue with the same microscopic equipment. Advantages of SEM include: 1) large samples can be used and thus foreign materials at lower concentrations can found, 2) there is much less preparatory work since with variable pressure SEMs the face of the paraffin tissue block can be used, and 3) in situ assessment shows tissue context of the particles or fibers including identifiable specific tissue responses or locations that might suggest lab contamination. Recently, Raman microscopy has been used to study both fibers and particles in human tissue. Raman spectra provide both elemental and structural data on particles and fibers and therefore can be highly specific. However, Raman microscopy has a myriad of known interferences that must be managed including tissue fixation, staining, and mounting media. The studies described provide contributory evidence for a causal link between the presence of specific materials and the development of the patient’s disease process.

 

Bio:

Dr. John Godleski was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health from 1978-2017 retiring as Professor of Pathology in 2017, and currently is Professor of Pathology, Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and as a student used electron microscopy in his research. Dr. Godleski trained in Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, received further training in Pathology at the University of North Carolina and in research at Harvard School of Public Health. He was on the faculty of Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and was recruited to head Pulmonary Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a position he held for 37 years. His bibliography includes papers related to pulmonary/environmental pathology with many using analytical microscopy, specifically X-ray analysis, electron energy loss spectroscopy, and Raman microscopy. Dr. Godleski received research grants from NIH, EPA, and other funding agencies as Principal Investigator, led the Particles Research Core in the Harvard-NIEHS Environmental Research Center, was Associate Director of the Harvard Clean Air Research Center supported by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and led the electron microscopy facility at Harvard School of Public Health. His trainees include Pathology residents and fellows, medical students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. He is a recognized expert in pulmonary pathology, environmentally related disease, and the diagnosis of foreign material in tissues throughout the body. His current research uses polarized light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray analyses, and Raman microscopy.

 

Ankur Jain

“RNA aggregation and neurodegenerative disease”

Expansions of short GC-rich repeats produce several neurological and neuromuscular disorders including Huntington disease, myotonic dystrophy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. One hallmark of these diseases is the appearance of aberrant agglomerates (termed ‘foci’) of RNA and RNA binding proteins in the nucleus. Peculiarly, disease symptoms, as well as RNA foci only appear when the number of nucleotide repeats exceeds a critical threshold. The mechanism of foci formation and this characteristic dependence on the number of repeats was not known. 

We found that the RNA foci result from sol-to-gel phase transition of the repeat-containing RNA. The disease-associated repeats form templates for multivalent intermolecular base-pairing interactions between the RNA. An increase in the number of repeats corresponds to an increased valency for intermolecular hybridization. Sol-gel phase transitions exhibit sharp valency dependence, and thus, beyond a critical number of repeats, the RNAs become excessively prone to gelation or aggregation. Compounds that disrupt base-pairing interactions disrupt RNA foci in patient-derived cells and offer a potential route to therapeutics. Analogous to protein aggregation disorders, sequence-specific gelation of RNAs could be a contributing factor to neurological disease.

 

Bio:

Ankur Jain is a member at the Whitehead Institute and an assistant professor at the Department of Biology at MIT. He received his bachelor's degree in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India in 2007, and his PhD in Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ron Vale at the University of California San Francisco and started his current appointment at Whitehead in 2018. 

Location

McGovern Auditorium
Whitehead Institute
9 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142

Parking