Speakers

Pr Ramin Shiekhattar´s biography (PDF)

Wistar Institute Professor
Gene Expression and Regulation Program and Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program
The Wistar Institute
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia - USA

François performed his PhD thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. His project, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Jean Rommelaere concerned the regulation of the parvoviral early promoter activity.
Next, François joined the laboratory of Prof. Tony Kouzarides at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, where he initiated his work on the intimate link between DNA methylation and chromatin modifications.
After his postdoctoral training, François established his own group and pursued the studies he started in Cambridge at the Faculty of Medicine, Free University of Brussels. Currently, François is the Director of the Laboratory of Cancer Epigenetics at the Free University of Brussels, and is a “Senior Research Associate” of the Belgian "F.N.R.S.”. François recently received the EMBO Young Investigator Award.

Selected recent publications:

• Villa et al. (2007) Cancer Cell
• Brenner and Fuks (2007) Dev. Cell
• Viré et al. (2006) Nature
• Brenner et al. (2005) EMBO J.

Dr Ali Shilatifard´s biography (PDF)

Dr Di Croce has recently joined the CRG as group leader (in May of 2003). During his relatively short carrier, Dr. Di Croce has already made significant contributions to the fields of chromatin, epigenetics, and cancer.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy) in 1996. He then moved to the Institute for Molecular Biology and Oncology (IMT) in Marburg (Germany) (from 1996 to 1999). He was able to recapitulate the MMTV promoter activation using an in vitro chromatin assembly system combined with purified transcription factors. Using this approach, he identified the precise order of molecular events that leads to TFs binding, chromatin remodeling and promoter activation (Nucl. Acid Res. 1998 and 1999; Mol. Cell, 1999; EMBO J, 2001 and EMBO J, 2003).
He returned to Italy to the European Institute of Oncology (IEO, Milan) to perform a second post-doc in the laboratory of Dr. P.G. Pelicci (from 1999 to 2003), switching his focus to studying chromatin alterations in leukemia. His experimental work contributed to the elucidation of the role of histone deacetylation in early phases of the development of leukemia (Mol. Cell, 2000); to the demonstration that DNA methyltransferases interact with oncogenes (e.g. PML-RAR, Science, 2002) and proto-oncogenes (e.g. Myc, EMBO J. 2005), and its implications in cancer progression; and to the characterization of the reversion of the leukemia phenotype by using compounds that interfere with chromatin silencing (Science, 2002).
In the last two years, Dr. Di Croce’s scientific interest was focused on characterizing the role of proteins involved in the recognition and binding of methylated CpGs (MBDs) in several leukemia models. Experiments demonstrated that MBD1 is required for gene repression in leukemic cells (PNAS, 2006). More recently, his lab demonstrated the cross-talk between DNA methylation and histone modification in both normal (Nature, 2006) and pathological conditions (Cancer Cell, 2007, Science 2007).

Selected Publications:

1. Lee MG, Villa R, Norman J, Yan KP, Di Croce L, Shiekhattar R (2007) Demethylation of H3K27 regulates polycomb recruitment and H2A ubiquitination. Science, 318, 447-450.
2. Villa R, Pasini D, Gutierrez A, Viré E, Nomdedeu JF, Jenuwein T, Pelicci PG, Minucci S, Fuks F, Helin K, and Di Croce L (2007) Role of the Polycomb repressive complex 2 in leukemia. Cancer Cell, 11, 513-525.
3. Villa R., De Santis F., Raker V., Corsaro M., Gutierrez A., Buschbeck M., Morey L., Varas F., Bossi D., Minucci S., Pelicci PG. and Di Croce L. (2006) The methyl-CpG binding protein MBD1 is required for PML-RAR? function. PNAS 103, 1400-1405.
4. Viré E., Brenner C., Deplus R., Didelot C., Morey L., Bernard D., Vanderwinden J., Bollen M., Di Croce L., de Launoit Y. and Fuks F. (2006) The Polycomb group protein EZH2 directly controls DNA methylation. Nature 439: 871-874.
5. Di Croce, L., (2005) Chromatin modifying activity of leukemia associated fusion proteins. Hum Mol Genet 14, R77-R84.
6. Di Croce, L., Raker V.A., Corsaro M., Fazi, F., Fanelli M., Fuks, F., Lo Coco, F., Kouzarides, T., Nervi, C., Minucci, S. and Pelicci, P.G. (2002) Methyltransferase recruitment and DNA hypermethylation of target promoters by an oncogenic transcription factor. Science 295, 1079-1082.
7. Di Croce, L., Koop, R., Venditti, P., Westphal, H. M., Nightingale, K. P., Corona, D. F., Becker, P. B., and Beato, M. (1999). Two-step synergism between the progesterone receptor and the DNA- binding domain of nuclear factor 1 on MMTV minichromosomes. Mol. Cell 4, 45-54.

Matthias Mann received his doctorate degree from Yale University in 1988, where he had been instrumental in the development of electrospray mass spectrometry, a key technology underlying proteomics. This work contributed significantly to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002, given to Dr. Mann’s supervisor John B. Fenn. At Yale, Dr. Mann met his future wife, Helle Porsdam, who became a professor at the Center for American Studies here in Odense. During a postdoctoral stay with Prof. Peter Roepstorff at the same university, Dr. Mann developed a number of instrumental advances in mass spectrometry as well as the first bioinformatic search algorithm for peptide fragmentation data.
He then joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg as a group leader for six years. During these years the group developed high sensitivity mass spectrometric methods and pioneered the first high throughput protein identification studies. His current appointment is as professor of bioinformatics at the University of Southern Denmark. His group works in the fields of signaling and nuclear structures as well as proteomics technologies. Recent accomplishments include mapping the human nucleolus and spliceosome, stage specific mapping of malaria parasite proteins for vaccine and drug development as well as development of SILAC a novel method for quantitative proteomics, as well as application of methods to the elucidation of molecules in the EGF receptor pathway.
Dr. Mann, who is among the most highly cited researchers in Europe, has been elected to membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization as well as the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences and also to a visiting professorship at Harvard Medical School.
Since 1994, Dr. Mann has had a very active collaboration with Prof. Angus Lamond, then at the EMBL in Heidelberg and now at the University of Dundee. The two groups mapped the first multiprotein complexes together and pioneered the concept of time lapse proteomics, in which advanced imaging and proteomics methods are combined. Recently, Dr. Mann has moved to take up a directorship at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. Here his group continues to address cell signaling problems using proteomic technology, as well as to develop this technology. His group recently described the first experiments in comprehensive quantitation of the phosphoproteome and the proteome using the SILAC technology.

Dr Reinberg is also Professor of Biochemistry at New York University School of Medicine. He received his B.A. degree in biology from the Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile, and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After his postdoctoral work at the Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and then moved to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he became Distinguished University Professor before taking his present position.

Peter Fraser trained at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. Then with an NIH Postdoctoral fellowship and Cooley’s Anemia Foundation Grant he went to London to work with Frank Grosveld at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. While there his research focussed on dissecting the function of the human beta-globin locus control region (LCR) using transgenic mice as a model system. From London he moved to Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam in 1993 and set up a research group working on long-range control of globin gene expression by the LCR. During this time his group published a number of influential papers on the dynamic nature of the LCR and obtained indirect evidence that suggested a direct chromatin interaction between the long-range LCR/enhancer and individual globin genes (Wijgerde et al., Nature, 1995; Milot et al., Cell 1996; Dillon et al., Mol Cell 1997). Toward the end of his time at Erasmus he published one of the first papers on the potential role of non-coding, intergenic transcription in regulating chromatin domain structure (Gribnau et al., Mol Cell 2000). In 1999 he was awarded a Senior Non-Clinical Fellowship from the Medical Research Council and moved to the Babraham Institute in Cambridge to become Head of the Laboratory of Chromatin and Gene Expression. While at Babraham his group pioneered techniques to investigate higher-order chromatin interactions and was first to show that long-range transcriptional enhancers directly contact their target genes through formation of large chromatin loops in vivo (Carter et al., Nature Genetics 2002). We went on to show that individual genes are not transcribed in isolation but share RNA polymerase-rich, sub-nuclear compartments known as transcription factories. They showed that genes as far as 40 Mb apart in cis or indeed on separate chromosomes can frequently shared the same transcription factory (Osborne et al., Nature Genetics 1994). Of key importance was the discovery that all genes, and their associated regulatory elements must migrate to these limited number of sites to be transcribed. Subsequently they showed that activation of the immediate early genes Myc and Fos, involved rapid gene movements to transcription factories with preferential interchromosomal associations between the translocation prone Myc and Igh gene loci (Osborne et al., PLoS Biology 2007). These results along with out most recent work indicate that the organization of transcription within the mammalian cell nucleus has functional implications for genome-wide coordinate gene control, and may be a driving force in the tissue-specific nuclear organization of the genome.