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

Speaker: Professor Guoping Fan, Professor Emeritus, Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: Epigenetic mechanisms in neural development and degeneration

Date: 23 April 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, G/F, Laboratory Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Zhongjun Zhou

Biography

Prof. Fan obtained his BS in biochemistry from Nanjing University, PhD in neurosciences from Case Western Reserve University, and conducted postdoctoral research at Whitehead Institute/MIT. He has been a faculty member at UCLA since 2001, and become tenured Full Professor in (2011-2021), Professor Emeritus (2021-present). Since 2024, he has been a PI and Adjunct Professor (2024-) at the Scintillon Research Institute in San Diego, USA. His research centers on epigenetics, stem cells and regenerative medicine. He has published more than 100 papers as a corresponding author in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell Stem Cell, Molecular Cell, Nature Neuroscience, with more than 23,000 citations. For many years, he has been rated as a "highly cited scholar", and also served as an editorial board member of many international academic journals and a special reviewer for more than 20 top journals. He is a regular grant reviewer for NIH, the Maryland and Connecticut Stem Cell Research Fund, and a special reviewer for the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Education's Yangtze River Scholars. He won the O’Connor Basil scholar award, the Carol Moss Spivak Neuroscience Scholar Award, the UCLA "oppenheimer award", Royan International Research Prize in Biotechnology and Embryology, and the first prize of the Chinese Medical Association Science and Technology Award.

Abstract

Epigenetic factors including DNA methylation, histone modifications, chromatin remodeling are major gene regulatory machineries in development and disease.  In this talk, I will focus on the role of DNA methylation in neural development and disease.  DNA methylation catalyzed by a family of DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs) is well known for its important role in transcriptional gene regulation. Our previous studies have shown that DNA methylation is involved in neural stem cell lineage differentiation, neuronal maturation and activity-dependent gene regulation. Conditional knockouts of DNMTs in the central nervous system revealed that DNMTs are still important for adult brain function such as learning and memory. More recently, we showed that mutations in DNMTs are involved in late-onset neurodegeneration through the cross-talk with epitranscriptomic modifications such as RNA methylation.  Understanding epigenetic mechanisms in development and disease opens new avenues for therapeutic interventions of human diseases.

ALL ARE WELCOME.