08/20/10
Lillie Auditorium, 8:00 PM

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Sager Lecture - "Establishing a Body Plan: Maternal Control of Axis Formation in Drosophila"
Trudi Schupbach, Princeton University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute


Lecture Abstract:
How a single egg cell can give rise to a complex organism is a question that has engaged biologists for over a century. Research in developmental biology has shown that this process occurs in stepwise fashion, where the initial embryonic axes are defined by simple localized signals already present in the egg before fertilization, followed by subsequent refinements in patterns of gene activity and differentiation of the tissues. The question though remains, how the initial asymmetries are programmed into the egg. Dr. Schupbach’s laboratory has investigated this question in Drosphila. They have found that the final molecular egg asymmetries reflect patterning in the overlaying somatic tissues of the ovary that surround each developing oocyte. Surprisingly, they found that during oogenesis, multiple signaling events relay localized information from the oocyte to the somatic tissues, and from the somatic tissues back to the oocyte. These localized signaling events result in the final asymmetric distribution of patterning molecules inside the mature egg. They have also shown that signaling through the EGF receptor plays an important role in these events. Our analysis has therefore given us a detailed understanding how initial localized signals in the Drosophila ovary result in secondary patterning events that then establish the embryonic body plan.

Dr. Trudi Schupbach is a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and currently serves as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is also an adjunct professor of Biochemistry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.  Dr. Schupbach studies the genetic and molecular mechanisms that establish developmental asymmetries in the Drosophila egg, particularly a signaling process involving the Drosophila epidermal growth factor receptor, which plays a central role in anterior-posterior and dorsoventral patterning of the egg and the embryo.

She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where she worked with Rolf Nöthiger on the genetics of sex determination in Drosophila. After postdoctoral training in Zurich and at Princeton with Eric Wieschaus, she was a research biologist at Princeton before joining the faculty. In 1994 Dr. Schupbach became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Schupbach was recently elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she is a recipient of the Conklin Prize from the Society of Developmental Biology.

Dr. David Raible will introduce Dr. Schupbach.  Dr. Raible is a professor at the University of Washington and co-director of the MBL’s Zebrafish Development and Genetics course. He is currently researching the genes and compounds that alter hair cell replacement after damage, and, the genetics of zebrafish hair cell toxicity. Dr. Raible received a B.A. from Cornell University and completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania in Neuroscience.  He is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Developmental Biology, and served as the chair of the NIH Review Panel NCF. Dr. Raible serves on the editorial board of several journals including Developmental Dynamics, Developmental Biology, and Development. 

About the Sager Lecture
Dr. Ruth Sager was chief of cancer genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School where she was an acknowledged expert on supressor genes and their relation to breast cancer. Dr. Sager was the author of more than 200 scientific papers on cancer genetics and the existence of DNA outside of cell nuclei, her first field of research, which she pursued through the study of algae. In 1988, Dr. Sager received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal in phycology. This medal is awarded every three years in recognition of excellence in published research on marine or freshwater algae. After switching her field of study to breast cancer in 1972, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and studied the disease for a year at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory in London, England. Dr. Sager graduated from the University of Chicago. She earned a master’s degree at Rutgers University and a doctorate at Columbia University. Dr. Sager was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977.

She was a professor at Hunter College until 1975, when she joined Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her cancer research involved the identification of more than 40 possible tumor supressor genes with implications in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

She also proved “by persistent counterexample, where originality leads,” according to the University of Chicago Magazine article, published in 1994 when she was named alumna of the year.

Dr. Sager died of cancer in March, 1997, at the age of 79.