School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Professor Kunxin Luo, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Hippo signaling and phase separation

Date: 9 December 2024 (Monday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Kathryn Cheah

Biography

Prof. Kunxin Luo, Ph.D, is a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley and a faculty scientist at the Life Sciences Division in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  She received the Ph.D. degree from University of California, San Diego working on the Lck tyrosine kinase during T-cell activation in the laboratory of Dr. Bart Sefton at the Salk Institute.  She then continued her postdoctoral training with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, where she worked on TGF-β signaling.  In 1997, she joined the UC Berkeley, where she currently teaches and performs research to understand the signaling mechanisms of several tumor suppressor pathways including TGF-β, p53 and more recently Hippo pathways and how they regulate tumor development and metastasis, aging and development. 

Abstract

Mammalian development is regulated by intracellular signaling networks that in response to instruction by tissue architecture and polarity, function in a coordinated manner to activate downstream transcription, leading to the expression of genes necessary for cell fate determination and functional differentiation.  A key question in this process is how a signaling pathway generates specificity at the transcription level.

Transcription regulation involves the coordination of a large number of transcription factors and complexes on specific DNA regions.  liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) has been shown to play a critical role in transcriptional initiation, elongation and super-enhancer-driven transcription activation.  Using Hippo signaling pathway as a model, we explored how pathway-specific transcription factors engage the phase separation mechanism for efficient and specific transcription activation. These LLPS condensates may serve as scaffolds to concentrate proteins with similar functions, or to insulate protein complexes that act in different signaling pathways to generate specificity.

ALL ARE WELCOME.