Tomorrow.

Purdue University

School of Chemical Engineering

Graduate seminar series

Prof. Chongli Yuan

School of Chemical Engineering

Purdue University

“Seeking the Critical Traits of Epigenetic Modifications for
Early-Stage Disease Diagnosis”

January 14, 2014

9:00-10:15 a.m.

FRNY G140

Reception at 8:30 a.m. in Henson Atrium

Abstract. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that abnormal epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation and histone modifications are hallmarks of many types of diseases, such as lung cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. Understanding how different epigenetic patterns regulate gene activity and enabling sensitive detection of epigenetic patterns hold the key to developing the next generation of therapeutic and diagnostic tools of human diseases. By combining state-of-the-art quantitative fluorescence spectroscopy with engineering principles, we have established quantitative correlations among epigenetic content, chromosome structure, and gene activity. Such correlations can be used for screening early-stage disease biomarkers and identifying potential epigenetic modifications as novel drug targets. In addition, we have developed protein probes to identify and recognize disease-related DNA methylation marks. Our detection platform offers a simple and cheap DNA methylation detection approach, promising for detecting early stage cancers.

Bio.  Dr. Yuan received her BS degree in chemical engineering from East China University of Science and Technology in 2002. She worked with Dr. Lynden Archer at Cornell on the DNA mechanics and nanomaterial synthesis for her Ph.D.  After obtaining her degree in 2007, she moved to ETH, Zurich and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Prof. Tim Richmond’s group in molecular biology and biophysics. She joined the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University as an Assistant Professor in 2009. She received the ACS PRF new investigator award and CDMRP lung cancer concept award. Her current research primarily focuses on elucidating the epigenetic regulation mechanism in human cells and developing novel epigenomic tools to detect and quantify epigenetic modifications related with human diseases.

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