Time：4:00-5:30 PM, Tuesday, April 16，2024

    Host：Dr. Lianfeng Wu, PI of School of Life Sciences

    Venue：Room E9-109, Yungu Campus

Speaker:

Dr. Bin Liang, Professor, Yunnan University

Dr. Bin Liang received Ph.D from Fudan University in 2004. He did post-doc research with Dr. Ji Ying Sze at University of California, Irvine and Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 2004-2006, and with Dr. Jennifer L. Watts at Washington State University from 2006-2010. In 2010, he established his laboratory by the recruitment of the Bairen Project at Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and lately moved to School of Sciences, Yunnan University in 2019. His laboratory focuses on the lipid droplet biology and fatty liver using Caenorhabditis elegans, mice and primates, and has published more than 50 papers. He is a member of editorial board of Journal of Lipid Research, and Biophysics Reports. 

Abstract:

Lipid droplets (LDs), originating from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), are neutral lipid storage organelles that conventionally function as hubs of cellular lipid and energy metabolism, and are involved in numerous life processes. Either overproduction or underproduction of LDs has been implicated in the etiology of human diseases, especially metabolic disorders such as obesity, fatty liver, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, as well as others. Therefore, LD homeostasis must be tightly regulated to ensure their appropriate functions. Our lab has worked on the regulation of LD growth including LD biogenesis, expansion/fusion, and shrinkage. We found a unique monomethyl branched-chain fatty acid, C17iso, as the side chain of phospholipids to ensure the ER integrity for lipid droplet growth (JCB 2021). We have revealed that disruption of the ribosome biogenesis (Nature Comm. 2018), or the citric/tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle (Cell Reports 2022), shifted energy to be stored as triacylglycerols (TAG) in LDs. Recently, we showed that LET-767, a homologue of mammalian 17β-HSD3/12, required for LD proteins, DHS-3, PLIN-1, and DGAT-2, targeting to LDs (JCB 2024).

Contact：

Wenyue Yu: yuwenyue@westlake.edu.cn

School of Life Sciences