will be held online on Tuesday, October 27, 2020 from 15:00 to 16:00 hours.
Webex-Space: https://uni-luebeck.webex.com/meet/henriette.kirchner
Host: Dr. Henriette Kirchner
Department of Internal Medicine I
University of Lübeck
Abstract
The Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) is one of the most widely used anti-inflammatory drug targets and one of the most powerful metabolic regulators. It belongs to the nuclear receptor superfamily of ligand-activated transcription factors. GR can both activate and repress its target genes, but the exact mechanisms underlying this transcriptional polarity remain elusive. During recent years, genome-wide studies have revealed that GR function depends on and is modulated by crosstalk with inflammatory and metabolic transcription factors bound to common cis-regulatory elements. The relevance of this chromatin crosstalk for metabolic and immune homeostasis will be discussed.
Biosketch
Henriette Uhlenhaut studied Biotechnology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, and Applied Biology at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, USA. She graduated with a PhD from the EMBL University of Heidelberg international graduate program in 2007. During that time, she became interested in mechanisms of transcriptional repression important for mammalian homeostasis. That is why nuclear receptors became the focus of her postdoc in the Evans Lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, USA and at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
Since 2013, Prof. Uhlenhaut is a PI at the Helmholtz Diabetes Center in Munich, Germany. She received funding from the DFG Emmy Noether Program and the ERC Starting Grant. From 2018-2019 she was also a professor at the LMU Gene Center. Since 2019, she holds the Chair for Metabolic Programming at the TUM School of Life Sciences. Her contributions to endocrine research have been honored with the Friedmund Neumann Award and the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize.
