Speaker: Basile Tarchini, Ph.D. Professor, The Jackson Laboratory
Biography: Basile Tarchini is a Professor at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and an affiliated research faculty at Tufts University School of Medicine. He grew up in Switzerland and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Geneva with Denis Duboule, using mouse genetics to decipher how Hox gene transcription encodes position and timing along the developing limb and spinal cord. During postdoctoral work with Michel Cayouette at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM), he became interested in the mechanisms of cell polarization, and diverged from the laboratory’s model system, the mouse retina, to explore the inner ear. He continued this work after establishing his laboratory at The Jackson Laboratory in 2015, building numerous collaborations across the auditory and vestibular research communities in the United States and abroad. Dr. Tarchini’s research combines mouse genetics, imaging, and hearing and balance tests to discover the genes and mechanisms that build and maintain sensory hair cells, the cells that convert sound and head movement into electrical signals sent to the brain. His laboratory investigates how hair cells assemble and preserve their mechanically sensitive compartment, the stereociliary bundle, with particular attention to the contributions of G proteins to cytoskeleton polarization.
91르적 the seminar: Our work over the past decade shows that inhibitory G proteins (GNAI/Gai) are essential for hearing and balance, and perform distinct polarization tasks within the same sensory hair cell, each entrusted to a different regulator. We found that the orphan receptor GPR156 signals through GNAI to regulate hair cell orientation, producing for example the mirror-image arrangements that give some vestibular organs and fish neuromasts bidirectional sensitivity. Separately, the scaffold GPSM2 binds GNAI to distinguish the first stereocilia row and confer its tallest identity, building the graded height architecture that makes individual stereociliary bundles directionally sensitive. I will close with our more recent findings that the same GPSM2-GNAI complex persists in adult hair cells to hold stereocilia at precise, stable heights. Because mammalian hair cells are terminally differentiated, this fundamental work also supports emerging repair or regeneration therapies.
Please join us for this in-person event in 107 Norman Smith Hall.
