Cologne Seminars on Ageing "From genetic discovery to new ideas for therapy: stress responses in development and disease"

About Michael' s talk:
Human development can withstand mutational or environmental insults. Central to resilient cell fate specification are signaling pathways, referred to as stress responses, that detect and alleviate many adverse conditions. Mutations in stress response components cause a range of diseases that include cancer and neurodegeneration, but they can also interfere with development. How stress responses guide cell fate decisions to safeguard tissue formation and homeostasis is poorly under-stood. We have recently discovered several stress responses with important roles in development, including dimerization quality control, aggregate clearance, or the reductive stress response. These pathways ensure cell integrity by controlling processes as diverse as complex formation, protein aggregation, or energy production. However, while transient stress signaling provides cells with time to repair damage, these pathways must be turned off at the right time and place to prevent tissue degeneration. How stress response pathways are terminated is not known. I will describe our discovery of active and regulated stress response silencing that is tightly connected to human disease and suggest novel therapeutic approaches to correct aberrant stress signaling for therapeutic benefit against neurodegenerative disorders.