NLM DIR Seminar Schedule

Abstract:

Twenty-five years ago, the discovery that key animal and plant apoptosis protein domains had homologs in other branches of the Tree of Life (ToL), including bacteria, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the evolution of programmed cell death. However, the functional contexts of these domains in prokaryotes were poorly understood.

Over the past four years, our group has uncovered several novel prokaryotic systems which lay out an operational "grammar" and shared "vocabulary" of protein domains repeatedly shared in organisms with a multicellular lifestyle across the ToL. These insights throw new light on the interconnected evolution of multicellularity, altruism, and immunity, with special emphasis on the role of these systems in the earliest emergence of apoptosis/immunity systems in animals.