91亚色传媒

Speaker

Professor, Vanderbilt University

Ray Blind was born in Buffalo, NY, received a B.S. in Molecular Genetics at Fredonia State and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology at NYU under Michael Garabedian. After a brief postdoc with Tom Scanlan in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF, and an educational postdoc under Haile Debas in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, he began postdoc work with Holly Ingraham and Robert Fletterick at UCSF before starting his independent lab at Vanderbilt. The Blind Lab attempts to understand the signaling properties of nuclear second messengers such as sphingolipids, phosphoinositide lipids and soluble inositol phosphates using functional genomics, structural biology and chemical biology approaches.

The 91亚色传媒 Breakthroughs webinar series offers a window into the cutting-edge biochemistry and molecular biology research driving discovery.

Many small signaling molecules are found in the nucleus where they can modulate gene expression, but little is known about how this occurs. We use structural biology, functional genomics and chemical biology to study how nuclear signaling events regulate gene expression. Specifically, Blind will discuss 1) how nuclear sphingolipids, nuclear phosphoinositides and the heme breakdown product bilirubin directly regulate gene expression through the NR5A nuclear receptors, and 2) how loss of the nuclear signaling enzyme IPMK results in loss of inositol phosphates and specific inhibition of HDAC3 activity in human glioblastoma cells.