Föreläsningar och seminarier Fysiologföreningen presenterar: Professor Alain Prochiantz

Titel

“OTX2 and EN1 homeoprotein transduction, from physiopathology to therapeutic strategies”

Föredragshållare

Alain Prochiantz, Professor vid Collège de France, Paris, Frankrike

Abstract

Cell classical signaling pathways involve transduction cascades initiated by ligand-receptor interactions. But other pathways, long seen as minor and served by nanotubes, cytonemes or extracellular vesicles, have been identified. Another non-classical signaling pathway is homeoprotein (HP) transduction. The physiological significance of HP intercellular transfer was validated for several HPs, including ENGRAILED, PAX6, OTX2 and VAX1. Furthermore, HP transduction domains are highly conserved, explaining why most HPs pass between cells, a property recently confirmed in vivo for a minimum of 150 of them. Undoubtedly, HP transfer is quantitatively and qualitatively a major mode of signal transduction that has modified our understanding, at a molecular level, of many developmental and physiological phenomena in and out the nervous system, including early morphogenesis, axon guidance, cell migration, and cerebral cortex physiology. This has consequences also for the understanding of pathologies as suggested by recent experiments involving OTX2 and EN1 non-cell autonomous activities in the regulation of anxiety-like mood disorders and alpha-motoneurons survival, respectively. The conference will summarize the present knowledge on HP signaling and discuss the consequences of this non-conventional pathway for the development of original therapeutic strategies.

Värd

Abdel El Manira, Karolinska Institutet, institutionen för neurovetenskap