On Monday!
Dear all, On Monday December 9 Professor Jian Yan from Northwest University of China & Associate Professor, City University of Hong Kong is visiting Kontinkangas Campus, and he will give an Ad hoc seminar at 15.15. in F101. The title of his presentation is "Decoding the regulators influencing the epigenome".
Short CV Dr. Yan received his B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences at Tsinghua University, China and M.Sc. degree in Biotechnology at University of Helsinki. He continued his Ph.D. study with Prof. Jussi Taipale at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden investigating the molecular mechanism of transcriptional regulation in colorectal cancer. After obtaining the doctor's degree in 2014, Dr. Yan was awarded a prestigious prize for the outstanding oversea graduate students by the Chinese government. Meanwhile, he obtained two postdoctoral fellowships from both the Human Frontier Science Program and the International Postdoc Fellowship of Swedish Research Council (VR) and then he moved to the University of California San Diego to conduct his postdoctoral research on epigenetic regulation of 3D genome organization and gene transcription in Prof. Bing Ren's laboratory. In 2018, he joined the Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong as a tenure-track assistant professor, and in 2023 he was promoted to associated professor, and meanwhile he had been jointly appointed as a professor to the College of Life Sciences at Northwest University of China. Dr. Yan's primary research interest is to unveil the molecular mechanism of how non-coding genomic elements, including both cis-regulatory DNA elements and non-coding RNAs, participate in the transcriptional regulation. To achieve the goal, he has also developed multiple state-of-the-art genomic tools, such as HT-SELEX, SNP-SELEX, CARPID, Chrom-seq, etc to systematically study the interactions between the non-coding nucleic acids and binding proteins to illustrate their molecular function in the regulation of gene expression. By now, Dr. Yan has supervised more than 20 graduate students and postdocs, and published over 30 peer-reviewed significant scientific articles, mostly in high impact journals, such as Nature, Cell, Nature Methods, as the primary authors with a total citation over 7,000 times (h-index 22; i10-index 28).
About his presentation Chromatin epigenetic modifications are enriched at various cis-regulatory elements, essential for spatiotemporal regulation of gene transcription. The epigenetic marks interplay with different trans-regulatory factors, such as transcription factor (TF) and RNA. However, mechanism of the crosstalk has yet to be fully elucidated. In the first half, I'll discuss about the potential mechanism of how DNA methylation is regulated around the binding sites of CTCF, a highly conserved TF involved in 3D genome organization. By leveraging proteomic analysis, we found that multiple subunits of the nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase (NuRD) complex could bridge the interaction between CTCF and the TET DNA demethylases to mediate the CTCF-associated DNA demethylation. More interestingly, we show that chromatin the binding of CTCF heavily depends on the NuRD complex. Depletion of NuRD severely abrogates CTCF binding and leads to destruction of the chromatin high-order structures, revealing a novel role of the NuRD complex in 3D genome organization. In the second half, a novel method termed Chrom-seq to identify chromatin associated regulatory RNAs (carRNA) around various epigenetic marks will be introduced. The method avoids using crosslinking and antibody-mediated capture, and thus substantially enhances the signal-to-noise ratio. By applying Chrom-seq to different cells, we systematically map RNAs at various chromatin marks and validate the regulatory roles of some ncRNAs, endorsing the role of RNA in regulating the epigenome landscape.
If you are interested to have discussions with the speaker, please, contact Professor Aki Manninen. Welcome everybody! No registration required. Coffee is served during networking session 20 min before the presentation time. Field specific credits can be earned according to UniOGS recommendationshttps://www.oulu.fi/en/research/graduate-school/thesis-requirements-and-studies/study-requirements#accordion-control-recommendations-of-credits-for-different-activities- (attendance at scientific seminars for 10 hours: 0,5ECTS)
Kind regards Pirkko Pirkko Huhtala, PhD Coordinator Biocenter Oulu, University of Oulu e-mail: pirkko.huhtala@oulu.fimailto:pirkko.huhtala@oulu.fi tel: +358-294 486101, + 358-40 1897467 Street address: Room 476B, Aapistie 5A, FIN-90220 Oulu Mailing address: PO Box 5000, FIN-90014 University of Oulu, Finland www.oulu.fi/biocenterhttp://www.oulu.fi/biocenter