Event
BIOE Seminar: Amy Brock
Friday, February 1, 2019
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room 2132
Dr. Giuliano Scarcelli
scarc@umd.edu
Dr. Amy Brock
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
*STUDENT'S CHOICE SEMINAR*
Functionalized Lineage Tracing Reveals Adaptive and Evolutionary Dynamics in Cancer Therapy
Tumor expansion and chemoresistance are driven by the evolutionary dynamics of heterogeneous cancer cell populations. Beyond genetic variation, significant intratumoral epigenetic variation and plasticity of cell states underlies these heterogeneous phenotypes. Clonal fitness dynamics have been quantified by heritable DNA barcodes; however, it has not been possible to isolate lineages of interest for further analysis. In monitoring the emergence of chemoresistant cell populations, it is critical to identify and compare surviving cell lineages to determine the different adaptive trajectories towards resistance. To address this challenge, we developed a multifunctional barcode lineage tracing tool, Control of Lineages by Barcode Enabled Recombinant Transcription (COLBERT) that allows for i) simultaneous measurement of clonal fitness and lineage-resolved single-cell RNA-sequencing of high diversity populations to characterize and determine lineages of interest and ii) isolation of specific lineages, as a starting point for downstream molecular and functional live-cell analyses. I will discuss the implications of this new approach for understanding chemoresistance in breast cancer and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
About the Speaker
Amy received her B.S. from MIT and carried out her Ph.D. work at Harvard University, where she studied mechanobiology and cancer cell migration. Curious about how cells respond in heterogeneous ways to specific signals, she turned to the emerging field of systems biology. Her postdoctoral work was at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Amy joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin in 2013. The Brock Lab focuses on the roles of cell heterogeneity in cell state transitions, cancer progression, and therapeutic responses. To address these challenges, the lab is developing novel technologies and experimental approaches rooted in the tools of systems and synthetic biology and bioengineering.
