News & Events / BME Seminar Series / Past Seminar Speakers / 2018-19Kristen Naegle
BME Seminar Series Fall 2018
Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 4-5 pm
Tech L361
Host: Professor Eric Perreault
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering Department, Washington University in St. Louis
Unsupervised Learning to Unravel Differential Cell Fate Outcomes
Cells are constantly receiving cues from the outside world and responding to them by altering their physiological fate by transducing this signal via intracellular biochemical networks. An important mechanism that many cell networks utilize to transduce these signals is the regulation of protein tyrosine phosphorylation. The addition of a phosphate group to a tyrosine residue can cause changes in protein activity, localization, and interactions. Given the sheer size and complexity of these biochemical networks, computational methods are needed to help unravel how network flow is established and altered by changes in cell context, such as different tissue types or alterations as we seen in diseases like cancer. In this talk, I will introduce computational methods we have developed that have pointed to specific network alterations in HER2 ovexpressing cells that result in increased migration and the cell-based experiments we have used to test computationally-derived hypotheses. Our findings suggest there is power in considering protein-protein interactions as diagnostic tools for cancer and that, by combining systems-level experiments with computation, we can discover novel protein-protein interactions.
Learn more about Professor Kristen Naegle and their research.