BioE Colloquium: Shangqin Guo, Ph.D.

Deducing the rules of cell fate control.
Date
Nov 9, 2023, 4:00 pm5:00 pm
Audience
  • Faculty
  • Graduate Students
  • Staff
  • Undergraduate Students

Details

Event Description

Shangqin Guo, PhD, is an associate professor of cell biology at Yale Stem Cell Center. She uses hematopoietic progenitors and induced pluripotent stem cells as model systems to understand the rules of cell fate regulation. They visualized, at minutes resolution, the initiation of pluripotency from somatic cells (i.e. hematopoietic progenitors) driven by the Yamanaka factors, revealing that the rare cell fate transition into pluripotency is not random, but instead begins with cells that undergo ultrafast cell cycle at ~8 hours/cycle. Her team subsequently demonstrated that these fast-cycling progenitors also underlie malignancy initiation driven by the hematopoietic oncogene MLL-AF9. The fascinating biology presented by these naturally fast proliferating hematopoietic progenitors led them to develop a first-of-its-kind live cell cycle speed reporter. In their continued search for the mechanistic basis of how cell cycle dynamics contribute to cell fate regulation, they discovered that rapid cell cycle yields cells of distinct mechanical state in association with altered morphology. From these clues, their recent work reveals that the stochasticity in cell fate conversion can be largely eliminated when ERK activity is tuned within a very narrow range. They uncover a molecular mechanism for how cells tune ERK activity by regulating the subcellular allocation of actin during morphological remodeling – only tall enough cells become pluripotent. Guo lab continues to pursue a research interest in understanding why and how cells adopt different identity despite all else seemingly identical.