IMB Seminar Series - Professor Bernie Degnan - Origin of animal multicellularity and complex differentiation landscapes

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 04 May 2018

Time:

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Room:

QBP Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Bioscience Precinct (St Lucia)

URL:

https://imb.uq.edu.au/event/8822/imb-friday-seminar-series

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Origin of animal multicellularity and complex differentiation landscapes

The shared ancestor of all living animals minimally possessed epithelial and mesenchymal cell types that could transdifferentiate over an ontogenetic life cycle. This capacity to develop and differentiate required a regulatory capacity to control spatial and temporal gene expression, and included a diversified set of signaling pathways, transcription factors, distal enhancers, promoters and noncoding RNAs. In this seminar, I track the evolution of the regulatory architecture underlying cell differentiation in multicellular animals and provide evidence consistent with the first animal cell having a stem-like capacity to transition between multiple differentiated states.