Ali Shilatifard

Ali Shilatifard
Institutions
Alma mater


Notable awards

Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

ASBMB-AMGEN Award[1]
Spouse Laura Shilatifard
Children 4

Ali Shilatifard is an American biochemist/molecular biologist and the Robert Francis Furchgott Professor and Chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He is a senior editor for the journal Science, deputy editor for Science Advances, and an editor for the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology and is on the board of reviewing editors for eLife. Research in Shilatifard's lab focuses on the cause of childhood leukemia through chromosomal translocations, the role of ELL in this process, and the discovery of the Super Elongation Complex as being a central complex linking MLL translocations into a diverse number of genes to leukemic pathogenesis. Shilatifard’s studies and contributions have been cited across many scientific fields.[2]

Biography

Shilatifard has said he developed his love of science as a young boy working with and observing his grandfather,[3] a physician/scientist and professor of medicine of the University of Tehran. Shilatifard moved to the United States in 1984 where he began his study of organic chemistry at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He began to work on his doctoral degree in biochemistry at the University of Georgia, Athens. Shilatifard completed his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma where his mentor, Dr. Richard Cummings, had moved his program. As a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Shilatifard identified the first function of any of the MLL translocation partners found in leukemia[4] and proposed that transcriptional elongation control is central to leukemia pathogenesis. Shilatifard began his independent lab in the Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, where he identified the first histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4) methylase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: which he named Set1/COMPASS;[5][6] and defined the pathway of histone H3K4 methylation which is highly conserved from yeast to human.[7][8]


References

  1. ↑ Pinholster, Ginger. "2016 AAAS Fellows Honored for Advancing Science to Serve Society". AAAS. AAAS. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  2. ↑ Ali Shilatifard's publications indexed by Google Scholar
  3. ↑ Ali Shilatifard: Discovering the roots of cancer, St. Louis Business Journal, Jul 23, 2006
  4. ↑ Shilatifard et al, An RNA polymerase II elongation factor encoded by the human ELL gene, Science, Mar 29;271(5257):1873-6. (1996)
  5. ↑ Miller, T. et al. COMPASS: a complex of proteins associated with a trithorax-related SET domain protein. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 98, 12902-12907 (2001)
  6. ↑ Krogan, N. J. et al. COMPASS, a histone H3 (Lysine 4) methyltransferase required for telomeric silencing of gene expression. J Biol Chem 277, 10753-10755, doi:10.1074/jbc.C200023200[pii] (2002)
  7. ↑ Smith, E. & Shilatifard, A. The chromatin signaling pathway: diverse mechanisms of recruitment of histone-modifying enzymes and varied biological outcomes. Mol Cell 40, 689-701, doi:S1097-2765(10)00917-2 [pii]doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2010.11.031 (2010)
  8. ↑ Lee, J. S. et al. Histone crosstalk between H2B monoubiquitination and H3 methylation mediated by COMPASS. Cell 131, 1084-1096, doi:S0092-8674(07)01350-5 [pii]doi:10.1016/j.cell.2007.09.046 (2007)
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