报告题目: Reversible DNA and RNA methylation in gene expression regulation.报告人: 何川，芝加哥大学
主持人: 杨运桂
时间: 2015年8月31日（星期一）10:30－12:00 AM
地点: 中国科学院北京基因组研究所1层报告厅
报告摘要：
Reversible chemical modifications on nucleic acids and proteins play critical roles in biological regulation. The five bases that comprise nucleic acids ─ adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil ─ can be chemically and enzymatically modified. These chemical events can have significant biological consequences, particularly for gene expression. I will present chemical strategies we have developed to enrich, sequence, and study novel nucleic acid modifications that include 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and its further oxidized forms in mammalian genome. Prior to our work, no example of reversible chemical modifications on RNA that could affect gene expression had been shown. We have discovered the first two RNA demethylases: FTO, a protein associated with human fat mass obesity, and ALKBH5, a protein that affects spermatogenesis in a mouse model. These two proteins catalyze oxidative demethylation of the most prevalent internal modifications of mammalian messenger RNA (mRNA) and other nuclear RNA, N6-methyladenosine (m6A). These studies provide the first demonstration of reversible RNA modification that may impact biological regulation analogous to the well-known reversible DNA and histone chemical modifications. We have also discovered proteins that can selectively recognize m6A-modified mRNA and affect the translation status and lifetime of the target mRNA. These discoveries indicate the presence of a new mode of biological regulation that depends on reversible RNA modification.
报告人简介：
Chuan He, Ph.D, is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago. He was born in P. R. China in 1972 and received his B.S. (1994) from the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his Ph. D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemistry in 2000 with Professor Stephen J. Lippard. After being trained as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Professor Gregory L. Verdine at Harvard University from 2000-2002, he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and full professor in 2010. He was selected as an as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2013. He is also a member of the Cancer Research Center at the University of Chicago. His research spans a broad range of chemical biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, epigenetics, cell biology, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. His laboratory discovered reversible RNA methylation as a fundamental new mechanism of gene expression at the post-transcriptional level in 2011.
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