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Katie AYERS
May 28 at 11:00
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From: Murdoch Children Research Institute. Melbourne. Australia
Will give a seminar entitled:
Genetic regulation of sex development in humans
Associate Professor Katie Ayers is co-lead of the Reproductive Development group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne, Australia. Her group’s research focuses on the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying reproductive development and Variations/Differences of Sex Development (DSD) in humans.
Her talk will cover the genetics of gonadal development and DSD. She will discuss how her group is using genomic sequencing and functional analysis to identify and characterise new DSD genes in undiagnosed individuals, with a particular interest in syndromic gonadal dysgenesis. Katie also has a special interest in using stem cells to model human gonadal development and has developed a novel method to differentiate human pluripotent stem cells into embryonic testis-like organoids. This world first protocol, published in Stem Cell Reports in 2020, has potential application for DSD disease modelling and in a wide range of other research areas including fertility and cancer gonadotoxity. Finally, she will touch on recent efforts to map gonad-specific cis regulatory networks in an effort to uncover variants in non-coding regions underlying reproductive conditions.