The Svedberg seminar: Simon Elsässer
May 16 @ 17:15 – 18:15 UTC
Simon Elsässer is Associate Professor at Karolinska Institutet, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics. He has studied at University of Tübingen and Harvard University, and received his Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University in 2012. He has performed postdoctoral research at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and was recruited to Karolinska Institutet as a SciLifeLab Fellow in 2015. His research combines synthetic biology methods to probe and manipulate proteins in the living cell with quantitative ‘omics readouts, focusing on stem cells, gene expression regulation and epigenomics.
Title of the seminar: Exploring the dynamics of the pluripotent epigenome and lineage choice in development
Short Abstract:
The first lineage choice made in human embryo development separates trophectoderm from the inner cell mass, which proceeds to form the pluripotent epiblast and primitive endoderm. We discovered that Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) maintains naïve pluripotency and restricts an intrinsic capacity of pre-implantation pluripotent stem cells to give rise to extraembryonic lineages. Through quantitative ChIP-seq and single-cell transcriptomics, we demonstrate that PRC2-mediated repression provides a highly adaptive mechanism to restrict lineage potential during early human development.
Webpage: http://www.elsaesserlab.org