报告人：Marta Shahbazi PhD

Group leader of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK

会议时间：2023年3月21日（周二），20：00-21：00.

Zoom ID：879 334 96274  (Passcode: 408453)

讨论嘉宾：Chun So, National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing; Meng Zhu, Harvard Medical School

邀请人：周帆 助理教授

Biography：Marta Shahbazi is a Program Leader Track at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She obtained her PhD in 2013 at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre. During her PhD, she studied how microtubules regulate cell-cell adhesion in epidermal stem cells. In 2014, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge as a post-doctoral fellow, to study mammalian embryo development at implantation. She joined the LMB in February 2020 to understand how cell fate decisions and tissue shape changes are coordinated during mammalian development.

Abstract：Mammals develop from a small group of pluripotent stem cells that have the task to generate all the cell types and tissue shapes of the organism in an organized manner. This is achieved through feedback control mechanisms that ensure a tight coordination between cell fate specification events and changes in tissue morphogenesis. My group is exploring the link between tissue shape and cell fate during early post-implantation development. This is a critical period associated with changes in gene expression, cell organisation, and overall embryo patterning and morphology, but is poorly understood due to the inaccessibility of the embryo. Using new 3D stem cell models and embryo cultures we are investigating how the organisation of pluripotent stem cells in the embryo affects their identity and subsequent specification into distinct cell types.