Sharad Ramanathan (Harvard Univ.)

Finding Reaction Coordinates for Development
Date
Feb 1, 2017, 12:00 pm12:00 pm
Location
Thomas Laboratory, 003
Audience
Free and open to the university community and the public.

Speakers

Sharad Ramanathan
Professor
Harvard University

Details

Event Description

Our lab has been interested in single individual cells make developmental decisions. In this talk, I will discuss recent work done both in my lab and a team I led at the Allen Institute to understand early human brain development. I will focus primarily on the challenges related to data analysis in achieving our goal.  We discover that measuring the dynamics of expression of a hand full of genes is sufficient to 'read the mind' of the cell as it is making its lineage decision. I will show that this discovery allows us to (i) reconstruct the cell states and the sequence of lineage decisions that lead to the development of the human fore, mid and hind brain from single cell gene expression data, (ii) build probabilistic models of the underlying network and (iii) monitor the dynamics of decision making in real time.

Sponsor
Jarad Toettcher, Department of Molecular Biology
Event Category
Butler Seminar Series