Professor Yi Zhang, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill visited the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences under the invitation of Professor Ruiming Xu on May 27th.

Professor Zhang gave a presentation titled “Role of dynamic DNA methylation in stem cell and development” at IBP library. He first introduced some recent investigations of HMTs and HDMTs which are responsible to histone methylation profile. Later, Professor Zhang focused on the DNA methylation and demethylation in ES cells and development. Tet1 has an important role in mouse ES cells maintenance through maintaining the expression of Nanog in ES cells. Elp complex take part in the paternal genome active demethylation in zygote. During his speech, Professor Zhang also put forward some critical questions in the field that need to be addressed in the future.

The lecture hall was filled with interested audiences during Professor Zhang’s presentation. Once Professor Zhang finished his talk, many researchers and graduate students had a heated discussion with him about relative research topics.

Professor Zhang obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University where he studied the "hammerhead" ribozyme. His postdoctoral training was in Dr. Danny Reinberg's laboratory at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School where he identified and characterized several histone deacetylase complexes including the Sin3 and NuRD complexes.  According to a 2008 issue of Science Watch(Thomson Scientific), Professor Zhang is one of the few scientists who published the largest number of high-impact scientific papers in the 2002-2006 period.