logomark
Research

Research

BDR researchers coming from diverse research fields are working together to achieve higher goals.

Seminars & Symposia

Seminars & Symposia

BDR hosts annual symposium and regular seminars inviting international scientists in life science.

Careers & Study

Careers & Study

BDR embraces people from diverse backgrounds, and strives to create an open and supportive setting for research.

Outreach

Outreach

BDR communicates the appeal and significance of our research to society through the use of various media and activities.

News

News

From research, events, people and everything in between, find out what’s going on at RIKEN BDR.

About Us

About Us

Exploring the scientific foundations of life through interdisciplinary approaches to address society’s problems.

Mitochondrial dynamics in malignant progression: retrograde control from mitochondria
Apr. 27, 2018 12:00 - 13:00

Category

Seminar

Place

Osaka

Venue

Osaka Lounge A1F

Speaker

Atsuko Kasahara

Affiliation

Kanazawa University

Summary

Mitochondrial pleiotropic functions, such as aerobic respiration to produce huge energy, controlling apoptosis, and calcium regulation are reflected by their extremely dynamic morphology and distribution. Continuous fusion and fission excellently tune mitochondrial quality, distribution, size, and motility. Mitochondria-shaping proteins, dynamin-like GTPase optic atrophy 1 (Opa1), and mitofusin (Mfn) 1, 2 fuse, while cytosolic dynamin- related protein 1 (Drp1) divides mitochondria. Mitochondria have been considered and paid attention as key players in "cancer metabolism", however, growing evidences convince us that their shape and distribution could directly influence the malignant phenotypes of tumour cells.
Mitochondrial dynamics dictates "healthy" cell differentiation via modulating the canonical Notch1 signalling during cardiac differentiation (Kasahara et al., Science 2013). Likewise, mitochondrial dynamics could also control "unhealthy" tumour cell plasticity by impacting on other organelle's functions, such as endoplasmic reticulum (ER) via ER-mitochondria contact sites, or modulating signalling cascades that could possibly change tumour gene expressions. I would like to discuss about our recent study (Bassoy and Kasahara et al., EMBO J. 2017), as well as on-going projects.

Host

Yasushi Okada

PAGE
TOP