OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
During C. elegans development, 131 cells reproducibly die, and the genetic analysis of these ‘programmed deaths’ was instrumental in the elucidation of the apoptosis pathway (EGL-1 BH3-only, CED-9 Bcl-2, CED-4 Apaf-1, CED-3 caspase), which is conserved from nematodes to humans. Our analysis of the mechanisms through which the activity of the apoptosis pathway is controlled during C. elegans development has uncovered that the C. elegans ‘cell death fate’ is also ideally suited for addressing another fundamentally important question in developmental and stem cell biology and that is how cell fates diverge in the context of asymmetric cell divisions. I will summarise lessons learnt about apoptosis and present an update on our recent studies on cell fate divergence using the C. elegans cell death fate as a paradigm.
