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Hosted by Professor David Tremethick 

Epigenetics: remember the past & prepare for the future

The epigenetic system helps to fulfil two basic challenges of multicellular organisms: proliferation and differentiation. Epigenetic plasticity allows cells to differentiate, whereas epigenetic inheritance and maintenance help to maintain cell fate in proliferating cells and postmitotic cells. Interestingly, epigenetic mechanism not only regulate gene expression at the current stage, but also regulates gene induction kinetics in the future, via different mechanisms in different biological processes. In this talk, I will highlight our recent discoveries regarding how epigenetic mechanisms regulate the kinetics of future gene induction in biological processes such as memory and reining.

Biography:

Bing Zhu, Ph.D., is investigator and deputy director of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zhu received his Ph.D. from the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Following his postdoctoral studies at the Friedrich Miescher Institute, Switzerland, and at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he joined the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, as a faculty. Then he joined the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences as an investigator in 2014. He greatly contributed to revealing mechanisms governing mitotic inheritance of chromatin modifications. More recently, he advanced our knowledge in mechanisms preparing the cells for future gene induction, such as reining and transcriptional memory consolidation. Dr. Zhu serves as a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine. Dr. Zhu is an elected member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.