Biochemistry Seminar – Yungki Park : “Myrf (myelin regulatory factor): A story of a bioinformatician-turned neurobiologist”

Yungki Park

Department of Biochemistry

SUNY Buffalo

Title: “Myrf (myelin regulatory factor): A story of a bioinformatician-turned neurobiologist”

Abstract:
Myelination of the central nervous system (CNS) is critical to vertebrate nervous systems for efficient neural signaling. CNS myelination occurs as oligodendrocytes (OLs) terminally differentiate, a process regulated in part by the myelin regulatory factor, MYRF. In part I, I will discuss our discovery that Myrf is a membrane-bound transcription factor that undergoes auto-cleavage to release its N-terminal fragment from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane as a homo-trimer. The homo-trimer of Myrf N-terminal fragments enters the nucleus to exert transcriptional effects. Homo-trimerization is critical to the transcription factor function of Myrf N-terminal fragment because it confers DNA binding specificity. In part II, I will discuss our recent study where we utilized bioinformatics and epigenome editing analysis to uncover two OL enhancers that jointly regulate Myrf expression for the timely development of OLs.

Host: Jae-Hyun Cho

Location: 108 Biochemistry Building (Bldg#1507)