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Thank you for signing up for the inaugural WLA Research Conference. Please read the following notice for a pleasant experience.
All participants need to register for the conference online at our official website and pay the registration fee and/or the banquet fee.
The registration fee is $200.00 per person and $50.00 per person for the banquet fee.
You can purchase up to 5 extra tickets with each having their contact information.
A full refund is available before July 20, 2020 (Beijing Time). After this date, refunds will not be provided.
You are welcome to bring your research poster and display at the Poster Session of WRC.
You are encouraged to read the Poster Presenter Guidelines to help you better prepare for the session.
The Best Poster Prize will be awarded at the closing of the meeting on July 28.
Please bring your ID document to pick up your badge and meeting materials at the Registration table on July 26, 2023, 10 am - 2 pm.
Please wear your badge during the meeting. Contact WLA Labs staff immediately if lost, and temporary one will be provided.
Meeting materials include a program book, a note pad, a pen and a WRC bag.
English is the working language of the meeting. No interpretation service is provided.
The venue of the meeting is La Salle Versailles, Shanghai Science Hall. You can take metro line 13, at Middle Huaihai Road, or drive here.
The parking lot is at right side of the building.
We recommend the following 2 premium hotels nearest to the meeting that can offer you a delightful experience:
a) Okura Garden Hotel Shanghai, five stars: No. 58, Maoming South Road
b) Intercontinental, five stars: No. 118, Ruijin 2nd Road
General inquiry, please contact info@wlalabs.com.cn.
In case of emergency, please contact 021-655 7670
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Last updated: May 18, 2023
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Last updated: May 18, 2023
You've already registered for this Conference. Please find more details in My Event .Thank you!
You've already registered for this Conference. Please find more details in My Event. Thank you!
Featuring talks by
Prof. Dirk Görlich
Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Germany
Topic: The FG phase – A smart material for controlling transport between the cell nucleus and the cytoplasm
Dr. Cong Liu
Interdisciplinary Research Center on Biology and Chemistry (IRCBC), CAS, China
Topic: Protein amyloid aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases
Chaired by
Prof. Steven McKnight
UT Southwestern Medical Center, U.S.A.
Topic: How do protein domains of low sequence complexity work?
Most proteins encoded by the genomes of all life forms work by folding into intricate, three-dimensional shapes. These shapes allow individual proteins to preform unique and sophisticated biological functions. Evolution has crafted protein function to be encoded via the complex arrangement of long strings of amino acid sequences employing most or all of our 20 amino acid card deck. A small proportion of life's proteins, perhaps 10-20% in number, are impoverished with respect to amino acid sequence complexity. Instead of utilizing all 20 amino acid types, these unusual proteins display "gibberish-like" sequences composed of only a few types of amino acids. These protein domains of "low sequence complexity" resemble what the earliest of proteins in evolution must have looked like - they have a primitive appearance. The first session of the WLA Research Conference on Cells and Genes will cover science relating to these unusual proteins, including research pertinent to how they might work in the context of both biological and pathological settings.
Steven McKnight, Ph.D., received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Texas in 1974, and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Virginia in 1977. Since that time, he has worked as a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
McKnight has devoted his career to experimental studies of gene regulation. He made an unexpected discovery in the 1980s upon purification of one of the first eukaryotic transcription factors. A part of this protein was observed to fold into a three-dimensional shape that McKnight characterized as a leucine zipper. This structure and its surrounding science helped shape our current understanding of gene regulation.
Early in his career, McKnight also explored another transcription factor called VP16. Part of this protein was found to facilitate the activation of gene expression. Paradoxically, this part of the VP16 protein was incapable of folding into a stable, three-dimensional structure. The protein sequence of this region of VP16 was unusual in being composed of only a few types of amino acids - rather than the 20 amino acids normally required for proteins to adopt a stable structural fold. Subsequent studies from many other scientists discovered that these gibberish-like domains of low sequence complexity constitute upwards of 20 percent of our cellular proteins and are utilized in almost all aspects of cell biology.
Three decades after describing the enigmatic VP16 transcriptional activation domain, McKnight stumbled over an unexpected discovery that shed new light on the mystery. His team found that protein domains of low sequence complexity domain can self-associate in a manner leading to their separation from aqueous solution in a gel-like state. This phenomenon of phase separation, independently discovered by Dirk Görlich in studies of nucleoporin proteins, opened a new perspective toward our understanding of the dynamics of cell morphology. The phenomenon of phase separation provided McKnight and Görlich with an experimental approach for the study of protein domains of low sequence complexity.
Eventually, McKnight was able to demonstrate that low-complexity domains function in dynamic sub-cellular organelles not surrounded by investing membranes. Instead of folding up and remaining structurally ordered like normal proteins – low complexity domains combine with one another to form transient, reversibly ordered structures that control how dynamic areas of cells can morphologically appear and disappear according to the physiological state of a cell.
Dirk Görlich, Ph.D., studied biochemistry at the Martin Luther University in Halle (Germany). For his Ph.D., he joined Tom Rapoport's lab in Berlin, where he identified the heterotrimeric Sec61αβγ complex as a receptor for translating ribosomes and the protein-conducting channel of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Görlich also succeeded in reconstituting a fully functional "translocon" from purified components and demonstrated its capacity to transport secretory proteins across the ER membrane and to integrate type I and type II membrane proteins into the lipid bilayer. In 1994, he joined Ron Laskey's lab in Cambridge, where he discovered the first importins as mediators of protein import into the cell nucleus.
In 1996, Görlich became an independent group leader and later a Professor for Molecular Biology at the ZMBH (University of Heidelberg). During this time, Görlich put forward the RanGTP-gradient model to explain the directionality and energetics of nuclear transport, and his group was instrumental in discovering and characterising exportins, which mediate export from the cell nucleus.
Görlich is now a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and focused on the question of how nuclear pore complexes function as highly efficient transport machines. His team discovered that intrinsically disordered FG domains assemble into a condensed (selective) phase that functions as a highly selective permeability barrier of extreme transport capacity. Görlich's group also develops nanobodies as cell biological tools and as therapeutics for treating viral infections, bacterial sepsis, and autoimmune conditions. He received the EMBO Gold Medal and the WLA Prize.
Cong Liu, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. degree in 2008 from Peking University, followed by postdoc training at UCLA. He started his own lab since 2014. His research mainly focuses on protein phase separation and pathological aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) with systematical achievements. In brief, by combining newly developed chemical and biological approaches, he reveals the structural basis of protein pathological aggregation in NDs; demonstrates the regulation mechanism of protein aggregation by disease-related chemical modification; develops new strategies of designing small molecules to modulate protein phase separation for therapeutic application. In the past 5 years, as the corresponding or co-corresponding author, Liu published over 50 SCI papers, including Cell (2), PNAS (6), Nat Chem Biol (2), Nat Struct & Mol Biol (3), JACS (2), Cell Research (5), Nat Commun. (7), Mol Cell, Dev Cell, and Sci Adv.
Reversible RNA methylation in gene expression regulation
Prof. Chuan He
Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The University of Chicago
Over 150 types of post-transcriptional RNA modifications have been identified in all kingdoms of life. We have discovered two RNA demethylases, FTO and ALKBH5, which catalyze oxidative demethylation of the most prevalent modifications of mammalian messenger RNA (mRNA) and other nuclear RNA, N6-methyladenosine (m6A). These findings indicate that reversible RNA modification could impact biological regulation analogous to the well-known reversible DNA and histone chemical modifications. We have also characterized proteins that selectively recognize m6A-modified mRNA and affect the translation status and lifetime of the target mRNA. Functional studies reveal m6A methylation as a critical mechanism to group transcripts for coordinated metabolism, translation, and decay, allowing timely and coordinated protein synthesis and transcriptome switching during cell differentiation and development. I will present our recent work elucidating transcriptional regulation through m6A methylation and demethylation, and impacts of this regulation on mammalian early development as well as plant growth.
Lnc-ing RNA processing and function
Prof. Ling-Ling Chen
New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as new regulators in gene expression networks and exhibit a surprising range of shapes and sizes. Many lncRNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase II and are capped, polyadenylated, and spliced like mRNAs. By developing methods for genome-wide discovery and characterization of non-polyadenylated RNAs, we have identified several RNA species with unexpected formats. These RNAs are derived from long primary transcripts via unusual RNA processing pathways and are stabilized by distinct mechanisms, including capping by small nucleolar RNA (snoRNA)–protein (snoRNP) complexes at their ends (sno-lncRNAs) or forming circular structures. We have shown that sno-lncRNAs and circular RNAs are involved in key gene regulation events and are implicated in Pradier-Will syndrome and autoimmune diseases. In this talk, I will discuss the mechanisms of their formation and function, as well as how we study one sno-lncRNA (SLERT) that has enabled us to uncover previously unknown organization and regulation in the human nucleolus.
Translating spatial cell atlas to tissue function
Prof. Xiao Wang
Department of Chemistry, Broad Institute, MIT
Spatially charting molecular cell types at single-cell resolution across the entire three-dimensional (3D) volume of the brain is critical to illustrating the molecular basis of the tissue anatomy and functions. Recent development of spatial transcriptomic methods has enabled scalable profiling of transcriptome-defined spatial cell atlas. Yet, there is still a big gap between spatial cell atlas and tissue function. In this presentation, I will introduce a few experimental and computational advances in our lab that further enable multi-modality deep profiling of cell types and states in situ, bridging single-cell molecular profiles with single-cell functional status in intact biological tissues and accelerating gene-to-function discoveries in development and diseases.