Date: Friday, 25 January 2019

Venue: Seminar Room 4, G/F
Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
21 Sassoon Road, Hong Kong

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Title: Development of Aptamer-Based Regenerative Medicine Therapeutic Strategies
Speaker: Miss LIU Mengping (PhD candidate)

Summary:
Biological therapeutics are changing regenerative medicine, but antibody-based therapeutics have several disadvantages, including high production cost, limited shelf-life and complex manufacturing process. Aptamers, another type of biological therapeutics, are promising for the development of regenerative strategies and have potential advantages over antibodies, including longer shelf-life, simpler chemical synthesis and tailored specificity. This talk will focus on aptamer-based regenerative medicine that we developed for regenerative applications. Degenerative disc disease (DDD) is mainly caused by aggrecan degradation induced by ADAMTS5. Inhibitors against ADAMST5 are supposed to be therapeutic agents for DDD. Previous study in our lab has selected two aptamers against ADAMTS5 but their inhibitions were unknown. Our results showed that aptamer apt21 and apt25 can inhibit ADAMTS5 activity at micro molar level but their random sequences didn’t, suggesting they are promising to be developed as specific therapeutics for the ADAMTS5-caused DDD.

Title: The role of the RNA-binding proteins G3BP1 and G3BP2 in synapse development and function
Speaker: Ms DONG Rui (PhD candidate)

Summary:
Dendritic spines are specialized subcellular compartments of neuronal dendrites where the majority of excitatory synapses are present. Abnormal spine morphology such as the appearance of long filopodia has been observed in neurodevelopmental disorders. Spine morphogenesis is tightly regulated by many synaptic proteins. Our laboratory has previously identified protein arginine N-methyltransferase 8 (PRMT8) as a crucial regulator of dendritic spine morphology. While the molecular mechanism by which PRMT8 determines spine morphology remains unclear. We have identified Ras-GTPase activating protein SH3 domain binding protein (G3BP) as PRMT8-interacting proteins in the mouse synaptoneurosome. The two G3BPs, namely G3BP1 and G3BP2, are involved in mRNA metabolism such as the protection of mRNA degradation through the formation of stress granules. Here we found that the two G3BPs have distinct subcellular localization and function in neuron. In particular, knockdown of G3BP1 but not G3BP2 specifically increased the density of filopodia in dissociated hippocampal neurons, which mimics the effect of PRMT8 depletion. Our results indicate that PRMT8 and G3BP1 are novel key players in regulating dendritic spine development and synaptic function of neuron.

ALL ARE WELCOME