Lectures and seminars Seminar: "Controlling and visualizing dynamics of life across spatial and temporal scales’"

Title

"Controlling and visualizing dynamics of life across spatial and temporal scales"

In this seminar, Dr Farrants will present two classes of molecular tools that combine the cell-type specificity of genetic approaches with the advantages of small molecules in an epigenetic fashion. She will show how nanobodies can be modified to control protein localization with biorthogonal small-molecule drugs, and how we can expand the color pallet of indicators using bright chemical dyes. These tools allow the interrogation of dynamic living systems from the subcellular level to living animals, to better understand molecular processes in health and disease.

Speaker

Dr. Farrants is currently a postdoctoral associate working with Dr Eric Schreiter at the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to build molecular tools for physiology and neuroscience. 

She earned a Master of Chemistry degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she was introduced to visualizing cellular structures and activities using fluorescent molecules. She then earned a PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Medical Research, Germany, studying how to control proteins inside living cells.

Selected publications

Farrants, H., Shuai, Y., Lemon, W. C., Monroy Hernandez, C., Zhang, D., Yang, S., Patel, R., Qiao, G., Frei, M. S., Plutkis, S. E., Grimm, J. B., Hanson, T. L., Tomaska, F., Turner, G. C., Stringer, C., Keller, P. J., Beyene, A. G., Chen, Y., Liang, Y., .Lavis, LD., Schreiter, E. R. (2024). A modular chemigenetic calcium indicator for multiplexed in vivo functional imaging. Nature Methods, 21(10), 1916-1925. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02411-6

Farrants, H., Tarnawski, M., Müller, T. G., Otsuka, S., Hiblot, J., Koch, B., Kueblbeck, M., Kräusslich, H., Ellenberg, J., & Johnsson, K. (2020). Chemogenetic Control of Nanobodies. Nature Methods, 17(3), 279-282. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-020-0746-7

Farrants H., Gutzeit V., Acosta-Ruiz A., Trauner D., Johnsson K., Levitz, J., Broichhagen J. (2018). SNAP-Tagged Nanobodies Enable Reversible Optical Control of a G Protein-Coupled Receptor via a Remotely Tethered Photoswitchable Ligand. ACS Chemical Biology, 13(9), 2682–2688. https://doi.org/10.1021/acschembio.8b00628

Deo, C., Abdelfattah, A. S., Bhargava, H. K., Berro, A. J., Falco, N., Farrants, H., Moeyaert, B., Chupanova, M., Lavis, L. D., & Schreiter, E. R. (2021). The HaloTag as a general scaffold for far-red tunable chemigenetic indicators. Nature Chemical Biology, 17(6), 718-723. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-021-00775-w

Miyamae, Y., Chen, L., Utsugi, Y., Farrants, H., & Wandless, T. J. (2020). A Method for Conditional Regulation of Protein Stability in Native or Near-Native Form. Cell Chemical Biology, 27(12), 1573-1581.e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chembiol.2020.09.004

Host

MBB Faculty / MBB Frontier Grant Recruitment