Milwaukee 22nd September - This one-day symposium was organized by Prof. Dr. Brian Link’s lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) and co-sponsored by MCW and the Technical University of Munich. It brought together scientists interested in Hippo pathway signalling as it relates to the nervous system, heart and skeletal muscle.
Keynote speakers were Prof. Dr. Lin Mei of the Medical College of Georgia and Prof. Dr. James (Jim) Martin of the Baylor College of Medicine. In addition, Prof. Dr. Henning Wackerhage has presented on the Hippo-related Vgll factors in skeletal muscle and members of the Link group presented their recent work. Lin Mei’s lab has elucidated how synapses and neuromuscular junctions form and identified a role for Hippo signalling. He has also contributed to our understanding of muscular dystrophies. His team has published seminal studies on the neuromuscular junction and covered the topic in several reviews such as in there recent paper on "Neuromuscular Junction Formation, Aging, and Disorders".
Prof. Dr. Martin holds the Vivian L. Smith Chair in Regenerative Medicine and has made seminal contributions to studying cardiac regeneration in mammals especially in relation to Hippo signalling. Experimentally his arguably greatest discovery was that changed Hippo signalling can regenerate failing mouse hearts. Just after our symposium this study has been published in Nature, the leading science journal. This and other work on Hippo pathway in cardiac regeneration might pave the way towards enabling hearts to regenerate themselves after myocardial infarction and other injury.
The goal of this informal symposium was to share up-to-date research findings, gain feedback on novel ideas and hypotheses, and to promote collaboration. The symposium was funded in part by the Global Incentive Fund of the Technical University Munich, as well as the Department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology, and Anatomy at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The Global Incentive Fund facilitates collaboration between the labs of Prof. Dr. Henning Wackerhage (P.I.) and Prof. Dr. Brian Link (Collaborator). The other purpose of this visit was that Henning Wackerhage and Dr. Martin Schönfelder could learn key Hippo signalling methods in Brian Link’s lab.