Dr. Veena Prahlad, assistant professor, Department of Biology, Aging Mind and Brain Initiative, University of Iowa, will present the seminar “The innate immune response and neurodegeneration in C. elegans.”

Dr. Prahlad’s laboratory currently focuses on understanding how neurosensory perception of stress, and inter-tissue signaling mechanisms coordinate adaptive transcriptional responses of to protein damage. Some years ago, they discovered that the ancient and highly conserved transcriptional response of cells to protein damage, the heat shock response and upregulation of molecular chaperones, is controlled cell non-autonomously by sensory neurons and the serotonergic circuitry in C. elegans. They recently found that the activation of the innate immune pathway in peripheral cells that occurs as a consequence of mitochondrial Complex I inhibition can modulate neurodegeneration. They are currently identifying the signaling pathways and mechanisms by which a metazoan such as C. elegans coordinates its gene expression programs across different tissues to adapt to changing environments.