On June 22, 2016, with the invitation of Prof. Junmin Quan, Prof. Yujun George Zheng visited our school and gave a wonderful lecture titled “Chemical Biology of Protein Arginine Methylation”, teachers and students of our school actively participated in the academic discussions and exchanged ideas.
 

Dr. Zheng’s research lab works on the forefront area of chemistry, biology and medicine. In the post-genomic research era, there has been a great shift in focus from simply collecting and archiving genomic data to dissecting and interpreting complex genomic/proteomic functions and networks. Current active research areas include: (1) development of potent and selective epigenetic therapies, (2) design of chemical probes to understand protein acetylation and novel lysine acylation, and (3) mechanistic and functional study of protein arginine methylation. In the seminar, Prof. Yujun George Zheng introduced his lecture about Protein Arginine Methylation. He told us there are many challenging questions in arginine methylation. For example, substrate specificity of different PRMT enzymes, enzymatic mechanism of arginine methylation and develop isoform-selective inhibitors, etc. From the seminar, we got that the PRMTs are promising therapeutic targets for cancer therapy, and the pathology of histone methylation can be targeted by selective PMT inhibitors.
 

At the end of the report, Prof. Yujun George Zheng and our faculty and students on the content of the report exchanged their discussion. (Written by Xin Zeng)

Profile for the speaker:
Prof. Yujun George Zheng is the Professor of the University of Georgia. He received his Ph. D. degree from University of Miami, and carried out his postdoctoral work at Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.