Edith Heard

Collège de France

Epigénétique et mémoire cellulaire

Année 2024-2025

Conférence - Stephen Quake : Understanding the Mysteries of the Cell: Our Immune Repertoire Viewed Through the Darwin's Eyes

Stephen Quake

Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Lee Otterson Professor at Stanford University

Stephen Quake est invité par l'assemblée du Collège de France sur proposition de la Pr Edith Heard.

Résumé

The nature of the immune system's antibody repertoire has been a subject of fascination for more than a century. This repertoire is highly plastic and can be directed to create antibodies with broad chemical diversity and high selectivity. There is now a good understanding of the potential diversity available and the mechanistic aspects of how this diversity is generated. Antibodies are formed by a mixture of recombination among gene segments, sequence diversification at the junctions of these segments, and point mutations throughout the gene. However, certain very elementary questions have remained open more than a half-century after being posed: It is still unclear what fraction of the potential repertoire is expressed in an individual at any point in time and how similar repertoires are between individuals who have lived in similar environments. Moreover, because each individual's immune system is an independent experiment in evolution by natural selection, experiments about repertoire similarity also inform our understanding of evolutionary diversity and convergence. I will discuss how we have used high throughput sequencing to sequence immune repertoires in both humans and model organisms to address these questions.

Stephen Quake

Stephen Quake is Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where he oversees CZI's science grant programs, technology development, and the CZ Biohub Network. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to science and is one of only two dozen scientists elected to all three National Academies. Steve also holds a faculty position at Stanford University, where he is the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics. Previously he was the founding co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (2016-2022), investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2006-2016), and professor at the California Institute of Technology (1996-2005).