The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Other Tri-Institutional Events

Speaker(s)

9:30 a.m.: Roy Parker, Ph.D., distinguished professor and Cech-Leinwand Endowed Chair of Biochemistry, University of Colorado Boulder; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, RNP Granules in Health and Disease

3:30 p.m.: Christine Mayr, M.D., Ph.D., member, cancer biology and genetics program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, mRNA 3′UTRs Chaperone Intrinsically Disordered Regions to Control Protein Activity

Speaker bio(s)

Roy Parker is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Director, BioFrontiers Institute; Cech-Leinwand Endowed Chair of Biochemistry and Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and completed his Postdoctoral work at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester. His research has focused on the regulation of eukaryotic RNA, the assembly and function of RNP granules, and how alterations in RNA regulation lead to neurodegenerative diseases. He is, or has been, on the editorial boards of MCB, Science, Cell, RNA, Nucleic Acids Research, and was an editor of the Journal of Cell Biology and eLife. He was the President of the RNA Society (2010). He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2010) and Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2012).

Dr. Mayr received her M.D. from Free University in Berlin and her Ph.D. in Immunology from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. For her postdoc, she joined David Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute. In 2009, she started her own laboratory in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She is a full member of Sloan Kettering Institute and a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work on the cell type-specific expression of alternative 3′UTRs was selected by Science Signaling as one of the breakthroughs of 2013. In 2016, she was awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Her lab studies how the 3′UTRs of mRNAs control protein activity. In this context, her lab discovered a structural role for mRNAs in the cytoplasm, where mRNAs act as scaffolds of condensate networks, such as TIS granules or the FXR1 network. Moreover, 3′UTRs contain biophysical features that determine whether an mRNA is translated in the condensates or in the surrounding cytosol. These mRNA-scaffolded condensates act as special translation environments, which determine the activity of transcriptional regulators in the nucleus.

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