11:00 AM to 12:00 PM | December 14, 2020

Seminar: Chemotactic signaling and its relevance to inflammation and cancer

Zoom Webinar

Audience This is a public event.

A wide range of cells exhibit the capacity to respond and migrate directionally in response to external gradients. This behavior is essential for a variety of processes, including embryogenesis, wound healing, angiogenesis and metastatic invasion. Parent’s research program is aimed at understanding how cells detect and respond to external chemotactic signals and, in particular, how the spatial and temporal relay of chemotactic signals between cells impacts single and group cell migration. By tagging various signaling proteins with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) Parent’s group has been able to visualize where and when various cascades are activated in live cells. This has led to the proposition of novel mechanisms that explain how chemotactic gradients are amplified.

To gain insight into these processes, three complementary model systems are exploited: the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, mammalian neutrophils and breast cancer metastatic cell lines. In addition to combining biochemical, cell biological and genetic approaches, Parent collaborates with physicists to quantitatively describe the movements, with single-cell resolution, of large groups of cells and extract metrics that are relevant to the biological response studied. Such a plurality of model systems, along with a transdisciplinary approach, empowers Parent to understand signal transduction pathways in complex physiological settings and to directly translate her findings to clinically important processes such as leukocyte migration to sites of inflammation and cancer metastasis.

Speaker

Carole Parent, Ph.D.

Raymond and Lynne Ruddon Collegiate Professor of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology; Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, Michigan Medicine; Affiliate Research Professor, Life Sciences Institute

Carole Parent obtained B.Pharm. and M.Sc. degrees from the Université of Montreal in 1985 and 1987, respectively. She received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992, and did postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Peter N. Devreotes at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Parent joined the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the NCI in 2000, received tenure in 2006, was appointed Deputy Chief in 2010, and Deputy Director of the Center for Cancer Research at the NCI in 2016. In 2017, Dr. Parent moved to the University of Michigan to join the Department of Pharmacology as the inaugural Raymond and Lynne Ruddon Collegiate Professor in Cancer Biology and Pharmacology. Her laboratory is housed in the Life Sciences Institute of the University of Michigan, where she is an affiliate research professor.

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