by Leigh MacMillan
Michael Rosen, PhD, professor and chair of Biophysics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, will discuss mysterious cellular compartments known as “biomolecular condensates” during the next web-based Discovery Lecture.
Rosen’s lecture, “Cellular Organization Through Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation,” is on Thursday, Jan. 14 at 4 p.m. via Zoom. All participants need to register in advance to receive the webinar instructions.
Biomolecular condensates concentrate specific groups of molecules without a membrane surrounding them and are believed to form through the physical process of liquid-liquid phase separation. Rosen will discuss how the assembly of molecules that regulate the actin cytoskeleton into condensates leads to new biochemical functions and how condensate structures may play roles in chromatin remodeling, gene regulation and DNA repair.
Rosen is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Mar Nell and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
He received his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University and was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before launching his independent research career at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1996. He moved to UT Southwestern in 2001.
Rosen’s lecture is sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology. For a complete schedule of Discovery Lectures, archived video of previous lectures, and the webinar registration link, go to https://www.vumc.org/dls/.