Wednesday Seminar Series

Come hear from Caltech faculty and JPL scientists about their exciting research! Lunch will be served to the first 100 guests.

This week features Alison Ondrus, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

The secret lives of small molecules

Our bodies are filled with small molecules.  By "small" I mean 100 atoms or less- molecules that we could theoretically assemble bond-by-bond in a flask.  While we might be familiar with abundant small molecules that serve as building blocks (e.g. amino acids) and energy sources (e.g. fats and sugars), we know very little about the less abundant metabolites that are derived from these structures.  Just recently we've started to appreciate how slight modifications on common structures can trigger powerful cascades in biological signaling.  A fascinating example of this occurs in the Hedgehog pathway, where just one oxygen atom appended to cholesterol- at a specific position- initiates pivotal events in the growth of a human embryo.  In this talk I'll walk through my journey from synthetic chemist to detective, where I now seek to unravel the secret mechanisms by which endogenous small molecules direct embryogenesis via the Hedgehog signaling pathway.