Biological Sciences Colloquium: Fatemeh Cheraghi

Fatemeh Cheraghi, a PhD student in the De La Cova lab, will be presenting a talk about her work entitled “Investigation of RASopathy variants and Raf protein regulation.”

The abstract is as follows:

RASopathies are a group of human developmental disorders caused by mutation of genes encoding components of the ERK signaling pathway, including RAF1 and BRAF. Although most RASopathy-associated variants enhance Raf signaling, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We hypothesize that variants affecting different domains of RAF1 and BRAF may alter signaling through distinct mechanisms, such as changes in Raf protein expression or subcellular localization. To test this hypothesis, we used Caenorhabditis elegans and CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to generate variants of the C. elegans Raf gene equivalent to those found in human patients. We analyzed phenotypes, Raf protein expression, and localization for five disease-associated variants. We will discuss how results from our C. elegans model may correspond to symptoms observed in human RASopathy patients.

The presentation will begin at 3:00 PM in Lapham Hall N101, preceded by an informal reception from 2:45 – 3:00PM.