EpiHK Summer 2019 Symposium
Highlights:
EpiHK 2019 Summer Symposium
August 26, 2019 @ HKUST
Supported by
The Lo Ka Chung Charitable Foundation
The EpiHK 2019 Summer Symposium was held at HKUST on the morning of August 26, 2019. Despite the stormy summer weather, approximately 100 attendees from various institutions have joined us at this exciting event. The half-day event included a keynote presentation, followed by talks from the EpiHK principal investigators and trainees to share their recent work in epigenomics research.
For the keynote presentation, we have invited Prof. Bing Ren from the University of California San Diego and Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, to give a keynote presentation on “Genomics of Enhancers“.
Abstract:
Transcriptional Enhancers play a crucial role in spatiotemporal expression of genes in multicellular organisms. Alterations of enhancer sequences have emerged as a major mechanism for phenotypic variations and disease pathogenesis. A thorough understanding of cell type specificity, function and mechanisms of action of enhancers is key to understanding the blueprint of the genome. In the last decade, great strides have been made in the identification of candidate enhancers in the human genome, but bottlenecks remain in the functional characterization of these elements. Importantly, the cell type specificity of the candidate enhancers identified to date is still unclear, and their target genes are yet to be defined. I will present our latest advances in genomics analysis of enhancers in the human and mouse genomes, with the use of state-of-the-art single cell technologies. I will also present progress in connecting the enhancers to their target genes via analysis of the 3-dimentional genome architecture, and discuss how this information help us to understand the functions of non-coding risk variants for various human diseases.
The keynote was followed by a mix of talks by our EpiHK researchers and trainees:
Xinlei Wang (HKUST – Prof. Angela Wu’s Lab)
Effect of methanol fixation on single-cell RNA sequencing data
Yile Huang (CUHK – Prof. Huating Wang’s Lab)
Large-scale interaction analysis of RNA binding proteins/LncRNAs to identify lncRNA nuclear localization mechanism
Evangeline Kang (CityU – Prof. Kui Ming Chan’s Lab)
Histone H2BE76K mutation alters nucleosome stability and drives cancer development
Prof. Kevin Yip (CUHK)
New tools for efficient single-cell clustering and circular RNA full-length quantification
Anqi Dong (HKUST – Prof. Tom Cheung’s Lab)
Deciphering changes in chromatin accessibility during muscle stem cell quiescence exit
Prof. Danny Leung (HKUST)
Delineating the role of G9a in regulating the epigenome and chromatin organization
With the symposium wrapping up, attendees came together one final time to further discuss with speakers and other participants on the topics presented, and potential upcoming collaboration work.
This concluded our event (our second EpiHK research symposium) and we would like to thank all the speakers and participants for the great exchanges in scientific insights and findings. We are already looking forward to the next symposium where we will have more up and coming research ideas in the field of epigenomics.
Thank you!