Start
Feb 01, 2017 - 14:30
End
Feb 01, 2017 - 14:30
Venue
Room. No. 240 Chemical Engg. Dept.
Event Type
Speaker
Dr. Karthik Shekhar Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title
Molecular specification of neuronal types using single-cell transcriptomics.
Abstract: Biological tissues are comprised of functionally specialized cell types that are organized in complex circuits. To understand the workings of complex tissues such as the brain or the intestine we need at the very least a catalog of the cell types that comprise them (i.e. the "parts list"). This is a cornerstone of biology. Cell types have been defined based on shape anatomical position physiological response and more recently using molecular and genetic markers. I will describe our recent work using a new technology that enables large-scale measurements of gene expression in single-cells to address this challenge in an unbiased systematic and data-driven manner. Using novel computational approaches to analyze the massive data that results from these measurements we have both defined cell types in the mouse retina and validated them biologically using rigorous histological techniques. This has also led to the discovery of new cell types in the mouse retina. Using this molecular census as a foundation we are now exploring ways to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of this diversity and its functional implications in neurodegenerative disease.Bio: Karthik Shekhar grew up in Mumbai and received his dual degree in Chemical Engineering from IITB in 2008 working on his DDP under Prof. A. K. Suresh. He completed his doctoral in Chemical Engineering in 2014 from MIT. Here he worked on problems at the interface of physics and immunology under the guidance of Prof. Arup Chakraborty. Since then he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard working at the interface of genomics and neurobiology.