4^th December at 12:00
Onsite event
in Presidentti auditorium, BioCity
Autumn 2025 program

Prof. Sara Wickström, University of Helsinki, Finland
Mechanical regulation of cell states

Host: Jenny Pessa (jenny.pessa@abo.fi)

Coffee and sandwich served at 11:45, first come first serve!

Six PhD researchers and early-career postdocs are welcome to have a lunch and discuss with Prof. Wickström after the seminar. This is a great possibility to learn hosting skills in a friendly environment and create connections for future. Everyone is welcome to join, BioCity Turku will offer the lunch.

If you got interested, please send an email to biocityturku@bioscience.fi

The Wickström lab combines state-of-the-art scale-bridging technologies from nanoscale atomic force microscopy and next-generation sequencing to novel ex vivo tissue culture methods, the whole organism live imaging and in silico modeling all the way up to analysis of the clinical patient material. The research is highly interdisciplinary and involves collaborations with mathematicians, physicists, and clinical oncologists. Recent work from the Wickström group has uncovered how a generation of cellular forces is important for controlling stem cell fate and coordinating cell fate with cell position within the tissue. Furthermore, the laboratory has discovered how extrinsic forces generated by the tissue impact chromatin structure and epigenetic gene silencing, thereby controlling the transcriptional state and lineage commitment of stem cells.

Selected publications

Koester J, Miroshnikova YA, Ghatak S, Chacón-Martínez CA, Morgner J, Li X, Atanassov I, Koch M, Bloch W, Bartusel M, Niessen CM, Rada-Iglesias A, Wickström SA. (2021) Niche stiffening compromises stem cell potential during aging by reducing chromatin accessibility at bivalent promoters. Nat Cell Biol 7, 771-781.

Nava MM, Miroshnikova YA, Biggs LC, Whitefield DB, Metge F, Boucas J, Vihinen H, Jokitalo E, Li X, García Arcos JM, Hoffmann B, Merkel R, Niessen CM, Dahl KN, Wickström SA. (2020) Heterochromatin-driven nuclear softening protects the genome against mechanical stress-induced damage Cell, 181, 800-817

Kim CS, Ding X, Allmeroth K, Biggs, LC, Kolenc OI, L’Hoest N, Chacón-Martínez CA, Edlich-Muth C, Giavalisco P, Quinn KP, Denzel M, Eming SA, Wickström SA. (2020) Glutamine metabolism controls stem cell fate reversibility and long-term maintenance in the hair follicle. Cell Metabolism 32, 629-642.e8

Miroshnikova YA, Le HQ, Schneider D, Thalheim T, Rübsam M, Bremicker N, Polleux J, Höppner N, Tarantola M, Wang I, Balland M, Niessen CM, Galle J, Wickström SA. (2018). Adhesion forces and cortical tension couple cell proliferation and differentiation to drive epidermal stratification. Nat Cell Biol 20, 69-80.

General information

• You can download and save all the autumn 2025 FoS-seminars to your calendar from here: https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Registration is not needed, participation list is circulated in the audience
• If you are a student and later wish to get a certificate of attendance from the Frontier of Science seminars, print out the seminar diary and after the seminar ask the BioCity coordinator to sign it https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Please note that any audio or video recording of the seminars is strictly forbidden.
• Autumn 2025 image credits to Kari Kaunisto: Sahlberg family collections, Biodiversity unit, University of Turku