Please join us for the next KAUST Smart-Health Initiative (KSHI) seminar:

Successful strategies to regeneration: lessons from salamander limb and tail regeneration

Speaker: Prof. Elly Tanaka, Senior Group Leader, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna (Austria)

Host: KSHI Seminar Series and BioEngineering program

Abstract

Limb and tail (spinal cord, vertebrate, muscle) regeneration is remarkably seen in the salamander, which otherwise shows highly conserved features of a basic tetrapod vertebrate. Over the last years, we have identified the stem cell sources of regeneration in these body structures which have revealed a number of surprises and diversity in successful regenerative strategies. The role of positional memory as a template for integrating amputation with control of growth and patterning is indisputable, and we have dissected the molecular basis of positional memory and how it interfaces with injury cues to enable regeneration.

Bio

Elly Tanaka received her AB at Harvard, her PhD at UCSF, and performed post-doctoral work at University College London. She became a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Dresden), and then Professor at the TU Dresden. Since 2016, she has been a Senior Group Leader at the Institute for Molecular Pathology, Vienna. She is interested in how to reconstitute and regenerate complex tissues. She uses natural models of regeneration such as the axolotl, as well as patterning processes in embryonic stem cell derived organoids.