The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Diane Mathis, Ph.D., professor, division of immunology, department of microbiology and immunobiology, Harvard Medical School

Speaker bio(s)

Mutations in the AIRE gene lead to APECED, a polyendocrine autoimmune disease with monogenic transmission. Mouse models of APECED revealed that Aire plays an important role in the generation of T cell tolerance in the thymus, mainly by inducing expression of a large repertoire of RNA transcripts, many of which encode proteins normally restricted to organs residing in the periphery, for example insulin or casein-a. Aire-induced proteins drive negative selection of self-reactive T cells in the thymus, and also promote positive selection of a distinct, perinatal population of regulatory T cells that guards against particular autoimmune manifestations. Transcriptional regulation by Aire is highly unusual in being very broad, context-dependent, probabilistic and noisy. Large-scale screens for Aire’s structural and functional allies have yielded novel insights into its molecular mechanisms of action. A major function is to control transcriptional elongation, lifting promoter-proximal polymerase pausing on a significant fraction of the genome; consequently, Aire also regulates RNA splicing.

 

Dr. Mathis obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and performed postdoctoral studies at the Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes (LGME) in Strasbourg, France and at Stanford University Medical Center. She returned to France at the end of 1983, establishing a laboratory at the LGME (later the Institut de Genetique et de Biologie Moleculare et Cellulaire) in Strasbourg, in conjunction with Christophe Benoist. The lab moved to the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston at the end of 1999. Through 2008, Dr. Mathis was a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and an associate research director and head of the Section on Immunology and Immunogenetics at Joslin, where she held the William T. Young Chair in Diabetes Research. Dr. Mathis is currently a professor in the division of immunology in the department of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School, and holder of a Morton Grove-Rasmussen Chair in Immunohaematology. She is also a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an associate faculty member of the Broad Institute. She presently serves on scientific advisory boards of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Genentech, Fidelity Biosciences, MedImmune and Pfizer, as well as of several research institutes worldwide. She is co-founder of Tempero, a biotech start-up that aims to produce novel therapeutics in the autoimmunity/inflammation space. Dr. Mathis was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003, the German Academy in 2007 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Alena Powell

Phone

(212) 327-7745

Sponsor

Alena Powell
(212) 327-7745
apowell@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3401