The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Mitzi Kuroda, Ph.D., professor of medicine, departments of genetics and medicine, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Speaker bio(s)

The dosage compensation and Polycomb group complexes in Drosophila are classic examples of chromatin factors that initiate and spread in cis to establish active or silent chromatin domains. NUT midline carcinoma (NMC), a rare squamous cell cancer, provides another dramatic example of chromatin spreading, with a role in human disease. NMC is driven by a BRD4-NUT fusion oncoprotein that forms around 100 extremely broad, cell type-specific, hyperacetylated domains through an apparent feed forward loop of histone modification and subsequent binding of modified residues. The resulting domains are much larger than typical activated regions or "super-enhancers," ranging from 100 kilobytes to 2 megabytes. These "megadomains" appear to originate from select pre-existing enhancers that progressively broaden, but are delimited by Topologically Associating Domain (TAD) boundaries. The size and targets of these large domains are likely to explain the extremely aggressive nature of NUT midline carcinoma.  Furthermore, the mechanisms underlying megadomain formation may help us to understand the normal establishment of chromatin domains, their conformation, and their limitation by TADs.

 

Dr. Kuroda studies chromatin organization and epigenetic regulation in Drosophila and in human cancer cells. She received her Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University, where she worked with Charles Yanofsky. After postdoctoral studies at Stanford, she was a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine prior to moving to Harvard Medical School in 2003. Dr. Kuroda has been an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, a Searle Scholar, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and has served on the board of directors of the Genetics Society of America, the North American Drosophila Board, and ad hoc on the NIH National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council. Dr. Kuroda is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Open to

Public

Host

C. David Allis, Ph.D.

Reception

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

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3934