Yukiko Yamashita

Yukiko Yamashita

Butler Seminar Series

Event Date/Location

November 2, 2022 - 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Thomas Laboratory 003

Speaker

  • Yukiko Yamashita Photo

    Yukiko Yamashita

    Professor
    HHMI, Whitehead Institute, MIT

    Yukiko Yamashita is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Biology, where she is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her study is centered on the mystery of germline immortality that supported the continuation of multicellular life for 1.5 billion years. Within this scope, she broadly studies asymmetric stem cell division, the maintenance of ribosomal DNA, functions of satellite DNA in cell biology and evolution.

Topic

Function of Junk: satellite DNA and transposons in germline

Eukaryotic genome contains a large amount of DNA that is considered junk, such as satellite DNA and transposons. Recent work from our laboratory started hinting at their potential functions, and I will overview these recent discoveries in the context of germline immortality---the continuation of germ cells that supported the evolution of multicellular organisms for 1.5 billion years

Audience

Free and open to the university community and the public.

Host

Department of Molecular Biology