Description:

Department of Pharmacology, Guest Speaker:

Lixing Yang, PhD

Assistant Professor
Ben May Department for Cancer Research
Department of Human Genetics
The University of Chicago

"The Causes and Consequences of Somatic Structural Variations in Human Cancer"

Genome instability is a hallmark of cancer and somatic structural variations (SVs) are common in cancer genomes. My lab focuses on the molecular mechanisms leading to somatic SVs and their functional consequences in diseases. We develop new computational methods to delineate SV signatures that reflect distinct molecular mechanisms. Intriguingly, some SVs are extremely complex and are formed as catastrophic events. We decompose complex SV signatures based on patterns of the SV events and deconvolute simple SV signatures using non-negative matrix factorization. Several new signatures are discovered. In particular, we find that transcription and DNA replication collision is likely to cause large tandem duplications in many tumor types. The collision repair deficiency can be therapeutically targeted. Moreover, we study how SVs in non-coding regions can drive cancer. We develop a new computational algorithm to predict candidate oncogenes activated by distal enhancers due to somatic SVs and are able to validate their oncogenic functions using in vitro and in vivo experiments.

***This event has been RESCHEDULED from August 28th***