报告题目：Transcriptionalmisregulation and cancer susceptibility
报告人：Gonghong Wei(卫功宏), Ph.D.
Associate Professorof Molecular Genetics
Academy of FinlandResearch Fellow
Faculty of Biochemistryand Molecular Medicine
Biocenter Oulu,University of Oulu, Finland
报告时间：2015年12月9日（周三）10:00
报告地点：逸夫楼C座314会议室
摘要： Prostate cancer is the second most common cancerand the fifth cancer death in men due to the development of metastatic lethaldisease while the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Manytranscription factors (TFs) are implicated in the establishment of geneexpression programs for prostate cancer progression. We therefore performedhigh-throughput ChIP-seq assays and mapped genome-wide binding sites for over100 TFs including prostate cancer-associated key players, AR, ERG, FOXA1 andHOXB13. Genomic distribution analyses reveal that some TFs like ERG occupy thechromatin regions close to bidirectional promoters, and others like AR indicatestrong binding preference at enhancers. Using available TF positional weightmatrix and bioinformatics tools, we observed that the prostate cancerrisk-associated SNPs identified by genome-wide association studies (GWASs) aresignificantly enriched in these TF binding sites. Together with eQTL analysis,we define potential causal SNPs within putative cis-regulatory drivers andcandidate genes, and towards systems understanding of transcriptionalmisregulation and cancer susceptibility.
报告人简介：Dr. Wei received PhD degree in Biochemistry andMolecular Biology under the supervision of Profs. Depei Liu (刘德培) and ChihchuanLiang (梁植权1914-2006) at Peking Union Medical College in2006. He then was trained as a postdoctoral researcher at University ofHelsinki, Finland. Since November 2011, he has been a PI heading a functionalgenomics laboratory at University of Oulu, Finland. Dr. Wei has served as areviewer for the journals such as Nature Genetics, BMCBioinformatics/Genomics/Systems Biology, Journal of Cancer, Molecular CancerResearch. He received a prestigious Academy Research Fellow post from theAcademy of Finland’s Research Councilfor Health in 2014, and several awards including Medix Prize 2015 for the bestbiomedical publication from Finland in 2014.
Dr. Wei is interested in understandingmechanisms of family-wide transcription factor targeting specificity, mappinggene regulatory networks to find targetable cis-regulatory drivers, genes andpathways with potential for personalized cancer therapy, and functionalinterpretation of genetic variants discovered by genome-wide associationstudies (GWAS) with current focus on prostate cancer. Recently, the teampresented the first pathogenic mechanism of a GWAS SNP, mediatingHOXB13-regulated RFX6 expression in responsible for the development of prostatecancer (Huang et al., Nat Genet. 46:126-135, 2014).