The PhD Student Winter Lecture this year will be given by Alex Cagan of the University of Cambridge.
Alex Cagan - illustrator, geneticist and explorer of animal DNA – is offering a new perspective on the tapestry of life. His work has profound implications for the pursuit of healthy ageing and the possibilities of cancer resistance.
Every multicellular organism is an evolving population of cells. From the moment of conception, our cells accumulate mutations and are shaped by selection within the tissue microenvironment. Cancer is the most visible outcome of this process, but somatic evolution is implicated in a growing number of pathologies and can be shaped by the environments and exposures an organism experiences. Until recently, we could only study these dynamics in humans and a handful of model organisms. Advances in ultra-sensitive sequencing now allow us to read the mutational histories of individual cells across the tree of life.
In his lecture, Alex will present findings from his lab's comparative studies of somatic mutation in mammals and beyond, showing how mutation rates scale with lifespan, how the same mutational processes are shared across widely divergent species, and how cell populations are influenced by their tissue ecology. He will discuss what these patterns reveal about the evolutionary constraints on cancer and ageing, how somatic genomes can serve as biosensors of environmental exposure, and how a comparative view of somatic evolution can contribute to a more complete understanding of human health and the natural world.
