Dr. Mengying Liu (Pile Lab) awarded first place at 2016 Midwest Chromatin and Transcription Meeting

Recent Ph.D. graduate, Mengying (Mona) Liu was awarded first place for her poster, "Investigating the connection between metabolism and SIN3 chromatin modification," at the 2016 Midwest Chromatin and Transcription Meetings held at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, MI.

Her work is beginning to crack open the complex cellular effects when specific chromatin-modifying proteins, in this case, SIN3, regulate gene transcription in the eukaryotic cell.

Do generalized chromatin-modifying proteins result in specific cellular metabolic shifts and can such shifts, when they occur, result in feedback mechanisms that affect the chromatin modifier protein functions themselves?

Liu recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation under the mentorship of Lori Pile, Ph.D., a leader in Drosophila chromatin remodeling and gene regulation.