Assistant Professor of Biology Satoshi Yoshida kicked off the Life Sciences Summer Research Seminar series today, describing his research on wound healing in yeast to a capacity crowd in Rosenstiel 118. Wound healing in cells has been a difficult problem to study, partly because methods to create defined wounds in cells in a genetic model system have been lacking Yoshida and co-workers discovered that after focusing laser light at sublethal dosages on a budding yeast cell, the yeast cell responses by reorganizing its actin cytoskeleton so that the focus of growth goes away from the bud and towards the wound site. Yoshida described experiments to then define the genetic requirements for this shift in focus, with key players including Rho GTPase, protein kinase C, and the formin Bni1. Yoshida discussed results from his recent Cell paper “Competition between Cell Polarization and Cellular Wound Healing” as well as more recent ongoing results from the lab. There was a lively discussion following the seminar with eager students suggesting all kinds of possible follow-up experiments.
The seminar series will continue next Monday, July 16 at noon in Rosenstiel 118, with presentations from Jerome Menet (Rosbash lab) and Adam Osborne (Wangh lab).
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