Topic: Cell Fusion The topic of this session is "Cell fusion". Unless you are a "cloned human", cell fusion was the very first developmental event that you experienced in your life, as fertilization. Cell fusion also serves to assemble and maintain many of our tissues, including muscle, bone and placenta. It is an integral process in which several mononuclear cells (cells with a single nucleus) combine to form a multinuclear cell, known as "syncytium". Although the basic celllular event of lipid bilayer fusion have been well studied in intracellular vesicle or virus-host cell fusion, molecular details underlying cell-cell fusions that occur during development are poorly understood. Many genes required for normal cell fusion in multicellular organisms have been identified; yet none has been demonstrated to encode a bona fide "fusogen" capable of joining the plasma membrane of two cells. The paper we are going to discuss reports that eff-1 gene is essential for a developmental cell fusion process in the nematode, C. elegans. Subsequent analysis revealed that EFF-1 protein is sufficient to activate fusion of cells that normally never fuse (Shemer, G et al, Curr, Biol, 2004). If you were in the authors' situation, how would you approach the cell fusion process and what kind of experiments would you design to identify molecular mechanisms of cell fusion? Starting from this paper, we will discuss what might be an effective experimental design to dissect the cell fusion process, to understand developmental strategies of organogenesis. Findings described in this paper will likely generate many new questions in your mind; we would like to discuss such questions with you. |