Fluid Machinery: The Nucleolus, Ribosomes, and Aging

Research combining insights from materials physics and cell biology has ushered in a new paradigm for understanding how the chaotic intracellular environment is brought to order, through the collective condensation of biomolecules into droplets of living information. In this talk, I will present an overview of these principles and ongoing work in this field, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between liquid-like condensates and traditional biomolecular machines, such as the ribosome, which forms through a complex assembly process in the multiphase nucleolus. Our lab has recently developed a set of tools to probe and engineer the nucleolus and the production of ribosomes, as well as their cytoplasmic function in protein translation. These studies are yielding new insights into how assembled ribosomes function in space and time, and how ribosomes can become dysregulated by molecular and organismal aging.

Speaker: Clifford Brangwynne, PhD, Princeton University