The Fourth Annual Scientific Lecture of the Asian American Heritage Month |
|
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Launch in standalone player | |
| Air date: | Friday, May 23, 2008, 1:00:00 PM |
| Category: | Special |
| Description: | Throughout his career, Yang Shi has made numerous fundamental contributions to the fields of gene regulation and chromatin biology. Using C.elegans, he identified a critical role for the histone acetylase CBP/p300 in differentiation and demonstrated a dynamic, antagonistic relationship between acetylases and deacetylases in controlling cell fate and tissue development. Yang Shi's recent breakthrough is the discovery of the first histone lysine-specific demethylase LSD1.
Histone methylation is a fundamental regulatory mechanism, which impacts transcription, DNA replication and damage response, heterochromatin, and epigenetic state of the cell. Histone methylation patterns correlate with stem cell maintenance and differentiation, and altered histone methylation is linked to numerous human diseases including cancer and neurological disorders. Since the discovery of histone methylation in the 1960s, methylation was viewed as a stable and irreversible modification. This dogma has now been disproved by Yang Shi's discoveries. With the identification of LSD1 and the additional demethylases JMJD2A-D, JARID1A-D and UTX/JMJD3, Yang has established that demethylases play a central role in the dynamic regulation of chromatin structure. Yang and his collaborators also solved the first crystal structure of a histone demethylase (JMJD2A), thus providing significant new insights into the chemical and molecular basis of the demethylation reaction. Importantly, Yang's most recent finding of the link between histone demethylation and X-linked mental retardation highlights the important role epigenetic regulators play in neurological disorders. Yang Shi's discovery of histone demethylases has created a major new field in molecular biology that is fast moving and has far-reaching implications in biology and medicine. The epigenetic regulation has emerged as a hot topic in neuroscience recently because of the new insights it provides for the mechanisms underlying various cognitive function such as learning and memory. Studying of epigenetic regulation has shed new lights on several major neurological and psychiatric disorders such as Rett syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression. Thus, Dr. Shi's talk will not only be of interests to the general audience at NIH, but also of special value to the NIH neuroscientists. More information about the speaker is available at http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dms/bbs/fac/shi_yang.html |
| Author: | Dr. Raynard S.Kington, Principal Deputy Director, NIH |
| Runtime: | 60 minutes |
| CIT File ID: | 14551 |
| CIT Live ID: | 6793 |
| Permanent link: | http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?14551 |