On September 30, 2016, with the invitation of Prof. Huang Yong and Peng Tao, Prof. Joshua Rabinowitz visited our school and gave an interesting lecture titled “Metabolism in Action”, teachers and students of our school actively participated in the academic discussion and exchanged ideas.

Prof. Joshua Rabinowitz used snacks to suggest the affection of nutrition to biological body and the key role of metabolism. The lecture was divided to four parts. In the first part, Prof. Rabinowitz introduced the method to investigate metabolism, were isotope tracers and LC-high resolution MS, using the “colored river” theory to trace metabolic products. However, the real thing is different because of the complex organism. In the second part, based on the “flux balance”, Prof. Rabinowitz found that lactate turned three times faster than glucose, and that TCA substrates were the main energy source even in cancer and hypoxia. He also discovered that tumors burned more lactate than glucose. In the third part, Prof. Rabinowitz’s student Ling Liu introduced the source and sinks of NADPH, which is the main biological hydride donor. She descripted the contribution of three different pathways in producing NADPH and different functions of NADPH in different cells. In the last part, Prof. Rabinowitz’s work indicated that the key enzymes’ mutation of folate metabolism may cause tumor.

The wonderful lecture implicated that cancer involved with metabolism from a special angle. (Written by Li Ting)

Profile for the speaker：

Prof. Joshua Rabinowitz got his B.A. with highest honor in mathematics and chemistry in 1994 at Universuty of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, than obtained the PhD in biophysics 1999 and medicine doctor in 2001 at Stanford University. During 2000 and 2004, Rabinowitz did research about accelerating onset of drug action through thermally generated aerosols as the co-founder and vice president at Alexza Pharmaceuticals. Since then, he worked at Department of Chemistry & Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics as a teacher in Princeton University, and got the professor tittle in 2011. Prof. Joshua Rabinowitz has already published more than 150 papers so far.