Secretariat, Alumni Association, IDAC
Date	Thursday, 25 April 2019, 16:00～
Room	7th Floor, Large-size Conference Room, IDAC Center for Basic Aging Research
Title	Zebrafish Models in Cancer Research
Speaker	Yasuyuki Hosono
Affiliation	Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute, Division of Molecular Therapeutics
Organizer	Yohei Hayashi (Cell Resource Center for Biomedical Research・ext 8572)
Abstract	Large scale transcriptome sequencing efforts have vastly expanded the catalog of lncRNAs with varying evolutionary conservation, lineage expression, and cancer specificity. Here we functionally characterize a novel ultraconserved lncRNA, THOR, which exhibits expression exclusively in testis and a broad range of human cancers. THOR knockdown and overexpression in multiple cell lines and animal models alters cell or tumor growth supporting an oncogenic role. We discovered a conserved interaction protein partner of THOR and show that THOR contributes to the mRNA stabilization activities. Notably, transgenic THOR knockout conferred a resistance to melanoma onset. Likewise, ectopic expression of human THOR in zebrafish accelerated the onset of melanoma. THOR represents a novel class of functionally important cancer/testis lncRNAs whose structure and function have undergone positive evolutionary selection. In addition to those findings, I would like to show some recent data and talk about what kind of approaches we can utilize against human diseases using Next-Generation Sequence (NGS) and zebrafish.