【活动预告】染色质与表观遗传学系列讲座第3场- Bing Ren

Bing Ren

任兵教授任职加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校（UCSD）表观基因组学中心主任、细胞与分子医学教授，同时也是Ludwig癌症研究所（LICR）的成员。任兵教授于1998年在哈佛大学获得生物化学博士学位，随后在怀特海德研究所（Whitehead Institute）进行了博士后工作，于2001年加入LICR和UCSD。任兵教授研究人类基因组中的非编码序列如何指导基因表达的时空模式，表观遗传机制如何在发育过程中调节这些序列的作用，以及这些序列的变化对人类疾病的影响。具体来说，他致力于识别和表征一类被称为增强子的转录控制元件。他的实验室开发了用于增强子全基因组分析的转化工具，并阐明了这些调控序列的染色质特征。他获得了国际人类基因组组织（HUGO）颁发的卓越科学成就奖，并被选为美国科学促进会（AAAS）会员。

Dr. Ren is Director of the Center for Epigenomics and Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is also a Member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR). Dr. Ren obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University in 1998 and joined the faculty at LICR and UCSD in 2001, after completing postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute. Dr. Ren is studying how the non-coding sequences in the human genome direct spatiotemporal patterns of gene expression, how epigenetic mechanisms regulate their output during development, and how changes in these sequences contribute to human diseases. Specifically, he focuses on the identification and characterization of a class of transcriptional control elements known as enhancers. His lab has developed transformative tools for genome-wide analysis of enhancers and elucidated the chromatin features of these regulatory sequences. He is a recipient of the Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Understanding Complex Traits and Diseases with Single-cell Epigenomics

A large number of sequence variants have been linked to complex traits and disease through genome-wide association studies, but deciphering their biological function is still challenging because most of them reside in noncoding DNA, where functional annotation is still lacking. A growing list of studies has shown that noncoding risk variants may contribute to human disease by perturbing the transcriptional regulatory sequences. However, it is still unclear whether this mechanism generally applies to the tens of thousands of risk variants identified to date. Efforts to address this question have been hampered by a lack of maps and tools to explore the transcriptional regulatory sequences in the human genome. I will present our recent progress in the mapping of candidate transcriptional regulatory sequences in the human and mouse genomes with single cell epigenomics tools. I will also discuss the development of highly predictive models for assessing the impact of sequence variants on DNA binding of transcription factors. Finally, I will describe how mapping the long-range chromatin interactions allows us to infer the target genes of noncoding risk variants in common diseases.

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10.Yu, Miao, and Bing Ren. "The three-dimensional organization of mammalian genomes." Annual review of cell and developmental biology 33 (2017): 265-289.

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