MRC-LMB, UK
Buzz studied Biochemistry at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He worked on the yeast cell division cycle during his PhD (1993-1997) with Paul Nurse at Cancer Research UK, then on fly cell shape with Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School for his post-doc. In 2001 he was awarded a Royal Society URF to return to the UK as a group leader. In 2007 his team moved to UCL’s MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, where he also served as Director of UCL’s Institute for the Physics of Living Systems. Most recently, in 2020, he moved to the LMB in Cambridge where he now has his lab.
09:00 - 09:45
Living systems propagate by undergoing rounds of cell growth and division. In fact, all modern day organisms are the progeny of a single cell that divided over 3.5 billion years ago. In this talk, by looking at features of the cell division cycle machinery that we (eukaryotes) share with our archaeal relatives, we will attempt to shed light on the origins of our cell division machinery. Since Sulfolobus acidocalrarius (isolated from a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park) is currently the most experimentally tractable archaeal relative of eukaryotes, a cell biological analysis requires super-resolution imaging at 75°C at pH3. By overcoming some of these technical challenges we have been able to shed light on the mechanisms of division in Sulfolobus. Through this research, we also hope to reveal fundamental features of the division process that have been obscured by the relative complexity of eukaryotic cells.
Evolution, cell division, morphogenesis, cell cycle, archaea, mechanics