Description:

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Departmental Seminar Series presents:

Titus Boggon, PhD
Associate Professor with Tenure
Departments of Pharmacology and of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Yale University

Rho GTPase signaling cascades are critical for cytoskeleton organization, cell morphology, cell motility and cell cycle. Although these pathways have been studied for over 30 years there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how they are regulated. My laboratory is interested in discovering these basic molecular level mechanisms of control. We are taking a ‘whole pathway’ approach that targets key upstream regulators and downstream effectors of Rho GTPases, and are focusing on specific discrete topics that will resolve fundamental gaps in the knowledge of Rho pathway signal regulation. A central topic of our research is to resolve major outstanding questions of how Rho cascades are regulated/dysregulated. We have done this by (a) discovering the autoregulation mechanism for a class of Rho effector kinase, (b) defining the molecular basis how Rho signaling controls actin depolymerization via a unique kinase-substrate interaction, and (c) defining the molecular basis for serine-threonine kinase phosphoacceptor specificity. I will present these studies.