1 00:00:05,501 --> 00:00:09,045 [Music] Hi, my name is Barbara Conradt and I am a Professor of Biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich.

During the next six weeks, I will be exploring programmed cell death with you. With me today are Sebastian Lhr, Ryan Sherrard and Saroj Regmi, the three TAs, who were absolutely critical in getting this course together and who will be working with us over the next few weeks. Why did I decide to offer a course on programmed cell death? I have been fascinated by programmed cell death ever since I was a graduate student at UCLA and in 1992, took a journal club on programmed cell death. As you will find out later this week, not much was known about programmed cell death at that time. I had to present a paper published that year on the identification of the <i>ced-9</i> gene from the nematode <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>, a model organism that I had not yet heard of. This paper was about the genetic characterization of the<i> ced-9</i> gene, which later turned out to encode a protein that can block programmed cell death. By taking this journal club and by having to read this paper, I became fascinated not only by programmed cell death but also by the model organism <i>C. elegans</i> and by genetic studies. During my PhD, I was trained mainly as a biochemist. I did have some genetics as an undergraduate. However, I had never used a genetic approach for my work and I didn t quite understand everything that was in this <i>ced-9</i> paper. A few weeks later, I had the chance to hear a couple of talks at UCLA from investigators who also used genetic studies in <i>C. elegans</i> to dissect specific biological processes. And those were Cori Bargmann, now at Rockefeller University, who talked about her work on chemotaxis and Barbara Meyer from UC Berkeley who talked about her work on sex determination. Both are great scientists and great speakers! After I had listened to their talks,

I made up my mind. For my postdoc, I wanted to study programmed cell death in <i>C. elegans</i> using genetic approaches. In 1994, I started my postdoc in the lab of Bob Horvitz at MIT. At the time, Bob Horvitz s lab was the only lab in the world that worked on programmed cell death in <i>C. elegans</i>. I got lucky and managed to identify a new component of the genetic pathway of programmed cell death in <i>C. elegans</i>. And when I started my own lab, we continued to work on various aspects of programmed cell death in <i>C. elegans</i>. And we still are working on various aspects of this really cool process. It s been almost 20 years since I started in this field and we have learnt a lot during this time. But, as you will see later during the course, there are some major questions that still have not been answered. We are continuing to work on those and we are still having fun. I hope that you will enjoy the course! I also hope that I will manage to get across to you my knowledge of programmed cell death as well as my fascination for this very important process. Hi, I'm Ryan and I am originally from the city of Saint John on the east coast of Canada, eh, but I have been living in Germany for a few years now. Having just completed my Masters in Biochemistry, here at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, I am now a PhD student in the lab of Barbara Conradt. Just like the topic you will learn about in this course, I study programmed cell death in multi-cellular animals and specifically, how it is regulated. Over the coming weeks, we hope to help you understand this complex process of cells death, why it is important, and offer you a glimpse into some of the methods we use in our own lab. Feel free to contact us on social media. via facebook, twitter or email. Hello there, my name is Saroj. I come from the southern part of Nepal. For the past

two years, I have been living in Munich as a PhD student in the lab of Barbara Conradt. If you have ever taken an introductory biology course, you probably know about mitochondria. What you might not know is that they are dynamic organelles that are constantly fusing and constantly dividing in a cell. In the lab, I study this process and its role in aging and development. As one of the TAs for this course, I will be monitoring the course forums and answering any questions you may have. We hope that you will enjoy the course and that it will provide you with a good understanding of programmed cell death. Hi, I m Sebastian, and I recently started my PhD here in the lab of Barbara Conradt at the LMU. I am originally from a small town near Dsseldorf, and funny as it may seem, I am the only german PhD student here in the lab. I completed my Masters in Biology here in Munich with a focus on human biology and epigenetics. I also branched into the field of bioinformatics, and developed a webserver for motif identification call XXmotif. Like the topic of this course, I study programmed cell death in the nematode worm <i>C. elegans</i> with a focus on the <i>egl-1</i> gene and its interacting factors. During the course, I hope that we can give you an interesting insight into our work including all the background knowledge you will need for this. If you have questions feel free to contact us through the Coursera platform. [Music]