Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/22/2019
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Location
Communicore, C1-3
The skin forms an essential barrier for retaining body fluids and resisting environmental insults. Throughout life, epidermal stem cells constantly rejuvenate this barrier as they move upward and stratify into layers. Despite the importance of the skin barrier, its formation remains poorly understood. Intriguingly, a well-known yet loosely defined membraneless structure within skin cells, keratohyalin granules (KGs), is impaired in skin barrier disorders (e.g. eczema) that are also frequently associated with mutations in skin repeat proteins, namely Filaggrin (Flg). Building on my previous work that identified Flg as a putative phase transition protein (Nature Materials, 2015), in this talk I will present a novel approach to illuminate the process of skin barrier formation through the engineering of fluorescent proteins that sense phase behavior in mouse and human skin. Using these advanced tools, together with mouse genetics, live imaging and atomic force microscopy, we demonstrate that Flg drives a dramatic event of liquid-liquid phase separation in skin to assemble a surprisingly extensive network of KGs that are at the crux of skin barrier formation by virtue of their stimuli-responsiveness and unique liquid-like properties. Importantly, knockdown of Flg in mouse skin as well as mutations in human Flg both impair skin barrier formation and abolish or severely impact phase separation. Besides providing unprecedented and therapeutically-relevant insights into the process of skin barrier formation, this work has broad implications to the emerging field of cellular mechanisms driven by phase separation, and beg the exploration of the underlying principles for the engineering of stimuli-responsive materials and skins with novel functionality.
Bio:
Dr. Quiroz trained as a biomedical engineer in his native Colombia before obtaining a PhD from the biomedical engineering department of Duke University in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti. There he focused on the engineering of self-assembling, protein-based materials for biomedical applications. An important outcome of his PhD work was the elucidation of sequence rules that rationalize the ability of intrinsically disordered proteins to phase separate into membraneless compartments in the cell.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University, he has taken his interests in self-assembly, phase behavior and protein engineering to address pressing questions about how skin stem cells build the so-called skin barrier. This work led to the discovery that gigantic repeat proteins in skin assemble a surprisingly extensive network of membraneless organelles with unique liquid-like properties that are crucial to the process of skin barrier formation.
Quiroz is the recipient of a career award at the scientific interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.