Events

Date: 5 February 2027   Time: 13:00 - 14:00     

Location: Peston Lecture Theatre, Graduate Centre, Mile End Campus

Jordan Raff - How do cells build organelles?

Abstract: A key feature of all living things is their ability to assemble complicated structures from dilute building blocks. How cells achieve this remarkable feat of bioengineering is largely unknown. Centrosomes are an excellent model for studying organelle biogenesis as they comprise 10s-100s of copies of several hundred different types of protein yet, like the DNA, they assemble a precise copy of themselves once per cell cycle. We have recently reconstituted centrosome duplication on synthetic beads programmed to recruit any one of several core centrosome assembly proteins when injected into Drosophila embryos. These beads generate structures that appear to be functionally indistinguishable from centrosomes: they recruit centriole/centrosome proteins, organise MTs and proceed through multiple rounds of high-fidelity duplication, all in synchrony with the endogenous centrosomes. Thus, recruiting a single protein to a synthetic surface is sufficient to seed the self-assembly of a complex, self-propagating entity. These findings suggest a general framework for organelle biogenesis in which simple localised molecular inputs can be regulated by cellular cues to seed the self-assembly of highly complex cellular structures.

About the speaker:

Prof Jordan Raff FMedSci FRS studied Biochemistry at Bristol, followed by a PhD with David Glover at Imperial College. He also stayed as a postdoc in the lab of Bruce Alberts at UCSF. Jordan started his lab in 1994 at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge. Since 2009 he is a group leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford.