Chuan He - RNA Methylation in Chromatin Regulation

Chuan He is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He received his BS from the University of Science and Technology of China and his PhD in chemistry from MIT.

He’s research spans chemical biology, RNA biology, epigenetics, biochemistry, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. In 2011, his group discovered reversible RNA methylation as a new mechanism of gene expression regulation. His laboratory characterized the RNA m6A methyltransferase complex and several key reader proteins that bind preferentially to m6A-modified RNA and regulate their stability and translation. In 2020, He discovered prevalent m6A methylation on chromatin-associated regulatory RNAs (carRNAs), which regulates chromatin state and global transcription. His laboratory has spearheaded the development of enabling technologies to study the biology of RNA and DNA modifications.

This talk was given at the 2023 Symposium on Physical Genomics at Northwestern University, sponsored by the Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center.