Würzburg Life Science Seminar: Matthias Hentze & Felix Randow

Prof Matthias Hentze - “Riboregulation: Biology, Mechanisms and Scope”

Matthias Hentze is director and group leader at EMBL Heidelberg. His lab combines biochemical and systems-level approaches to investigate the connections between gene expression and cell metabolism and their roles in human disease. In particular, riboregulation, the direct control of protein function by RNA, has begun to emerge as a new paradigm of biological control. The Hentze group wants to understand molecular mechanisms of riboregulation, and investigation of the RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) of model organisms points to their broad roles in mammalian physiology. Thus, he will discuss these new facets of the RBP world and their implications for cell biology, metabolism, and disease mechanisms during his talk.

Further information on Matthias Hentze

Prof Felix Randow - “How cells defend their cytosol against bacterial invasion: Sphingomyelin detection, LPS ubiquitylation and other tricks”

Felix Randow is group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. He is interested in cell autonomous innate immunity, i.e. in the ability of individual cells to defend themselves against infection. The lab wishes to understand i) how cells succeed in defending their cytosol against most invasion attempts and ii) how professional cytosol-dwelling bacteria outwit cellular defenses. They are particularly interested in danger receptors that detect breaches in cellular integrity and in the ubiquitin system that marks invading bacteria as cargo for autophagy receptors.

Further information on Felix Randow