School of Biomedical Sciences is pleased to invite you to join the following seminar:

Date: Tuesday, 22 November 2022

Time: 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road

Speaker: Dr. Chung-Chau Hon, Team Leader, Laboratory for Genome Information Analysis; RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Yokohama, Japan

Title: Deciphering the roles of non-coding transcription in human diseases

Biography

Dr. Hon obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2008, working on viral phylogenetics. After his PhD, he moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, for his postdoctoral training, working on transcriptomics of unicellular parasites. Later on, he moved to the RIKEN institute in Yokohama, Japan, to work on mammalian transcriptomics. Dr. Hon is currently leading a team at RIKEN, focusing on applying single-cell omics to understand human diseases. In particular, Dr Hon is interested in the potential roles of non-coding transcriptions in human diseases.

Abstract

Most diseases-associated-variants are non-coding and enriched in the cis-regulatory elements (CREs). Understanding the cell-type specific activity and transcriptional output of CREs (e.g. enhancer RNAs, long non-coding RNAs etc) are thus crucial to decipher the molecular basis of disease predispositions. By profiling the 5’ends of RNAs (5’-end-RNASeq), we can pinpoint these CREs and characterize their transcriptional outputs. We have applied 5’-end-RNASeq in large-scale, at both bulk and single-cell resolutions, to the major human tissues and cell-types. Using these datasets, we have built atlases of transcribed CREs (tCREs) and non-coding RNAs, allowing us to understand their cell-type specific activity and interrogate their potential roles in disease predispositions.

ALL ARE WELCOME

Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Miss Angela Wong at 3917 9216.