NUS Medicine PhD student receives prestigious Ray Wu Prize (2012)
Published: 13 Nov 2012
Ms Kong Say Li is a PhD student in the Department of Medicine under the main supervision of Professor Edison T Liu. She has recently submitted her thesis and will be conferred her PhD degree soon.
Her PhD thesis is on “Deciphering the enhanceosome-mediated transcriptional activation and cell proliferation in Breast Cancer”. Estrogen receptor α (ERα) is a ligand-inducible hormone nuclear receptor that regulates estrogen signaling in numerous human systems. Though the co-expression of ERα, FOXA1 and GATA3 has been documented in primary breast tumors, the nature of their coordinated interaction at the genome level or the biological consequences of their co-expression remains poorly understood. Hence, she carried out this work to decipher the genomics and biological impact by the conjoint action by ERα, FOXA1 and GATA3 in breast cancer cells. Interestingly, the genome-wide binding profiles revealed that these three transcription factors (TFs) co-localised in a coordinated fashion to form a functional enhanceosome that cooperatively orchestrates the optimal transcriptional activation upon estrogen stimulation. Importantly, this work revealed that the composition of enhanceosome is competent to reprogramme the transcriptome of breast cancer cells to establish new transcriptional regulatory cassettes favoring the estrogen-induced growth phenotype. Taken together, she has uncovered the genomics impact as well as the functional importance of an enhanceosome comprising ERα, FOXA1 and GATA3 in the estrogen responsiveness of ERα positive breast cancer cells. This enhanceosome exerts significant combinatorial control of the transcriptional network regulating growth and proliferation of ERα positive breast cancer cells.
