The Babraham Distinguished Seminar Series is sponsored by the Babraham Institute and the Babraham Research Campus which is home to more than 50 biotech companies. The seminars are also advertised to the wider Cambridge community. The series will provide exciting science talks by distinguished scientists from across the world in many areas of biomedical interest.
Prof Thomas Langer; Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Thomas Langer obtained his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. After a stay at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York working on chaperone-mediated protein folding, he established his independent group at the LMU Munich interested in mitochondrial protein quality control and neurodegenerative disorders. In 2002, he was appointed as professor at the University of Cologne and since 2018 as Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing in Cologne focusing on the analysis of mitochondrial proteostasis and its regulation in ageing and age-associated diseases.
Mitochondria are essential metabolic organelles and integral part of numerous cellular signalling pathways. Cellular signals determine the composition of the mitochondrial proteome and the metabolic output of mitochondria, which influence cell fate during development, cell differentiation, ageing and disease. Dysregulation of the metabolic and signalling functions of mitochondria are associated with cell death, ageing and disease and can induce the release of damage-associated molecular patterns to the cytosol and inflammatory responses. Imbalanced nucleotide synthesis leads to an increased incorporation of ribonucleotides into mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and causes the relocation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the cytosol and cGAS-STING-dependent innate immune signaling in senescent cells and in aged tissues of mice. These results highlight the sensitivity of mtDNA to aberrant ribonucleotide incorporation and support a critical role of mtDNA-dependent inflammation during the ageing process.
Following the talk there will be tea, coffee and cake bites.
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