Dr. Wenbo Li is invited as a Featured Speaker of 2019 in the Bioinformatics Club. Dr. Li published several landmark papers in the field of enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) when he was a postdoc in Dr. Michael G. Rosenfeld’s group. Now he is an Assistant Professor in the McGovern Medical School of the University of Texas Health Science Center, and CPRIT Scholar in the Cancer Prevention Research Institute Of Texas.

Here is the abstract of his talk:

The “recognition” between an enhancer and its cognate promoter in eukaryotes ensures proper gene transcription output. However, both the biological basis and the pathological involvement of enhancer-promoter recognition remain poorly understood. Here, using estrogen-regulated enhancer-promoter communication as an initial model, we report that loss of a preferred promoter can unexpectedly release its regulatory enhancer to loop to and activate an alternative promoter(s) in its chromosomal neighborhood. This target switching process of active enhancers was referred to as “enhancer release and retargeting” (ERR).  Based on additional analysis of disease risk loci, cancer mutation, and the GTEx database, putative ERR events represent a remarkably common, if overlooked, mechanism underlying alternative gene activation in cancer and neurodegeneration. Mechanistically, ERR may be controlled by a cohesin-mediated looping extrusion process but takes place in a much smaller genomic scale than topological domains or compartments. We expect that ERR plays a wide roles in determining gene-enhancer communication and gene expression deregulation in human disease.