MAKING NEW AND UNEXPECTED DISCOVERIES IN THE SEARCH FOR CIS-REGULATORY MUTATIONS IN CANCER GENOMES
Abstract
Mutations that directly alter protein function have long been associated with cancer. Yet, regions that code for proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. With the decreasing cost of genome sequencing, it has become feasible to examine the role of somatic mutations within the remaining 98% of the non-coding genome in causing cancer. In this talk, I will present our group’s recent efforts in the search for cis-regulatory mutations - somatic mutations that cause gene dysregulation by altering transcription factor binding sites in the promoter and enhancers of genes.
Significantly, I will show how this work led us to make an unexpected discovery of a novel mechanism involving transcription initiation and nucleotide excision repair (NER) which we have found to govern the frequency of somatic point mutations in gene promoters of NER-dependent cancer genomes. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this finding for our search for cis-regulatory mutations in cancer.
Speaker Biography
Dr Wong is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Prince of Wales Clinical School, UNSW and lead the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics Team at the Lowy Cancer Research Centre at UNSW, Sydney. He received his B.Sc (Hons I), specialising in Bioinformatics from the University of Sydney in 2002. As an Oxford-Australia scholar, he went on to complete a D.Phil in Bioanalytical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, UK in 2007. This was followed by an Irish Government post-doctoral fellowship at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research, University College Dublin, specialising in Chemical Proteomics, before returning to Sydney to establish his current research group.
To date, he has published 57 original research articles, 4 reviews and 2 book chapters with a total of 18 first author and 12 as senior author in journals including Nature, Genome Biology, Blood, Molecular Biology & Evolution, Nucleic Acids Research and Bioinformatics. He has attracted over $2 million in research funding as lead investigator from the ARC, Cancer Australia and Cancer Institute NSW.
His current research is focused on the study of mutational processes in cancer and its ultimate effect on gene regulation and function.
Seminar organised by UQDI's Professor David Evans. To arrange a meeting with Dr Jason Wong, please contact David directly.
