Hot Topic Lecture on how microbes solve mazes taking place tomorrow
07 April 2019
The first Hot Topic Lecture of Annual Conference 2019 will take place on Monday morning in the Main Auditorium at 09:20, after the President's open address.
It will be held by Professor Robert Insall (Cancer Research UK, Beatson Institute) and is titled ‘Creating a path – how single cells can solve mazes, see round corners, and find out where they ought to go.’ The lecture will focus on the ability of microbes to navigate and how this can be applied to understanding disease, creating transport routes and how cancer metastasizes in the bloodstream.
Professor Insall did his PhD at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB) in Cambridge, using the amoeba Dictyostelium as a model for development. His first independent position was as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB), University College London, still working on molecular mechanisms of Dictyostelium chemotaxis. He has worked at the Beatson Institute since 2007, studying what steers chemotaxis in cancer cells.
In his lecture, Professor Insall will show examples of cells moving collectively at a distance from one another, solving mazes of different shapes, and the mechanisms that enable cancer cells to spread from tumours into the bloodstream.
See our online programme to read the talk abstract and use the ‘Add to calendar’ feature to add the lecture to your diary.
Image: PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock.