Prof. Reiko Kuroda from the Tokyo University of Science will be presenting “The Genetics of Chirality in Snails.”
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Abstract:
Although our body is made up of mirror image halves and symmetric, internal organs display L-R (left and right) asymmetry. More strikingly, at the molecular level, all living organisms on Earth use the same invariant handedness, that is, DNA/RNA and proteins are made up of only D-(deoxy)ribose and L-amino acids, respectively. This so-called homochirality of biological world enhances the mystery of the origin of life on Earth 4 billion years ago. Further, chirality (L-R handedness) is important in pharmaceutical, agricultural and food industries, as biological effects of compounds often depend on the chirality.
I have been studying chiromorphology with a view to linking the microscopic and macroscopic phenomena through chirality, in both non-biological and biological domains. Today, I shall focus on our work on the coiling of the gastropods Lymnaea stagnalis, which is dictated by a maternally-functioned single gene locus. We could create healthy fertile mirror-image snails by mechanical manipulation of the embryos at the very early developmental stage, and showed that the chiral blastomere arrangement at this stage dictates the Nodal signaling pathway, the pathway operating in the vertebrates as well.
Biography:
Professor at Tokyo University of Science/ Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo. After Ph.D. in chemistry from The University of Tokyo, she worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry and then Research Fellow/Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Biophysics at King’s College London. She obtained a permanent senior staff scientist position at Institute of Cancer Research, UK. She was awarded many prizes including L’Oreal UNESCO Women in Science (2013). She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.