UCSF expert on brain “self-assembly” to present Einar Hille Memorial Lecture

Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, professor of biochemistry and biophysics and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco, will present the 11th annual Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neurosciences, sponsored by the Department of Physiology and Biophysics.

Marc Tessier-Lavinge

He will speak on “Wiring the Brain: The Logic and Mechanisms of Axon Guidance.” The lecture will be given at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, March 19, in room T-435 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.

Tessier-Lavigne studies how the developing brain becomes correctly wired. The brain is essentially a computer, and a very powerful one. The human brain is more powerful in many ways than the best man-made computer. Perhaps even more remarkable - the brain is a computer that assembles itself.

Computers process information using millions of transistors; the brain’s equivalent of a transistor is a synapse, a specific nerve cell structure that receives electrical signals from other nerve cells. The brain equivalents of the wires and printed circuits of computers are long extensions of nerve cells, called axons. Perhaps the hardest thing to imagine in the process of brain self-assembly is how growing axons manage to thread their way through millions of nerve cells in order to form precisely correct connections between nerve cells in different parts of the brain. Tessier-Lavigne has been a pioneer in discovering the mechanisms that direct the wiring of the brain during fetal development.

Tessier-Lavigne and his collaborators have shown that brain wiring is directed by proteins that act as molecular beacons - brain cells secrete specific proteins to attract growing axons in some cases, and repel growing axons in others. Axons sense the presence of the “beacon” proteins using specific receptor proteins displayed on the axons. Whether an axon is attracted or repelled by a beacon protein is determined by which receptor protein it possesses.

Tessier-Lavigne has exploited the fact that nearly identical axon guidance proteins are employed by nematode worms, fruit flies and man, so that genetic analysis of animals with simple nervous systems has guided discovery of these mechanisms in mammals. His work has established the importance of several classes of beacon proteins including netrins, which act on receptors called DCC and UNC5, and Slit, which acts on a receptor protein named Robo.

Tessier-Lavigne received a bachelor’s degree in physics at McGill University, Montreal, and a Ph.D. in physiology from University College, London. He received postdoctoral training at Columbia University in New York before moving to UCSF in 1991. He has received numerous honors, including the Young Investigator Award of the Society for Neuroscience, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

The Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neurosciences was established by Kristi Hille in honor of her late husband. Dr. Hille was a professor of mathematics at Yale University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Their son, Dr. Bertil Hille, is a professor of physiology and biophysics at the UW.