CCB Brown Bag Seminar

1st Speaker:  Justin Lindsay, Ph.D, Flatiron Research Fellow, Structural and Molecular Biophysics, CCB

Topic:  The Evening Complex Exposed: How ELF3's Dynamics Shape Temperature Sensitivity in Plants

The "Evening Complex" (EC) modulates circadian gene expression and growth in response to temperature in plants like Arabidopsis thaliana. This regulation involves the ELF3 protein's prion-like domain (PrD), which undergoes liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) influenced by a variable-length polyglutamine (polyQ) repeat. Our molecular dynamics simulations reveal the critical role of polyQ in forming transient temperature-sensitive helices and its impact on protein secondary structure. Aromatic residues primarily dictate protein contact dynamics, with changes at higher temperatures promoting aggregation. Understanding LLPS has broad implications, from agriculture to potential human disease therapies.



2nd Speaker: Daniel Needleman, Ph.D.,  Senior Research Scientist, Biophysical Modeling
Senior Project Lead, CCBx

Topic: Measuring and modeling the dynamics of mitotic error correction

When functioning properly, the mitotic spindle segregates an equal number of chromosomes to daughter cells. Over the course of spindle assembly, initially erroneous attachments between chromosomes and the spindle are fixed through a process called error correction. Despite the importance of chromosome segregation errors in cancer and other diseases, we lack an understanding of error correction and how it can go wrong. In this talk, I will describe recent measurements from my group of mitotic error correction, which can be explained by a simple coarse-grained model. This work provides a quantitative framework for understanding the dynamics of mitotic error correction.