
Événement: T. HARAYAMA invite le Pr. Giovanni D’ANGELO
Présentation
The lipotype Hypothesis
Pr. Giovanni D’Angelo
EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Single-cell genomics techniques have allowed for the deep profiling of
individual cells in multicellular contexts. These new technologies have enabled the
building of cell atlases where hundreds of different cell types are categorized
according to their transcriptional and epigenetic states. These analyses have led to
the depiction of detailed cell transcriptional landscapes that could be interpreted in
terms of cell identity. Nonetheless, transcription represents only one axis in the
establishment of cell phenotypes and functions and post-transcriptional events
crucially concur to cell identity in ways that cannot be simply derived from tran-
scriptional profiles. Thus, the chemical composition of individual cells and the
activity of metabolic pathways are likely as good descriptors of cell identity as tran-
scriptional profiles are. Moreover, accumulating findings assign to lipid metabolism
an instructive role towards the establishment of cell identity, yet our understanding
of the integration of transcriptional and lipid metabolic programs in cell fate deter-
mination remains superficial. Here I will report on our attempts to investigate
lipidomes at single cell levels and at high spatial resolution by MALDI imaging
mass spectrometry.
Giovanni D’Angelo graduated in 2003 with a MSc in Medical Biotechnology from
the University of Naples, Italy and obtained his PhD in Cell Biology in 2008 from
the Consorzio ‘Mario Negri’ SUD, Santa Maria Imbaro, Italy. For his postdoctoral
training, he moved to the Telethon Institute for Genetics and Medicine in Naples,
Italy to study sphingolipid metabolism and intracellular lipid trafficking. In 2012,
Giovanni moved to the Institute of Protein Biochemistry, at the National Research
Council of Italy in Naples as a principal investigator. In 2018 Giovanni moved to
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he is now
Assistant Professor and Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Chair on Metabolism.