Thursday, 15 March 2018 | 12:00 noon
Faculty of Medicine, National Heart & Lung Institute, Imperial College, London, UK
Vascular control of tissue homeostasis: transcriptional and epigenetic pathways
(Host: S. Zacchigna)
Blood vessels provide the essential function of transporting blood to tissues, and have for this reason been considered an essential but possibly dull “transportand delivery system”. However, it is now clear that vascular cells also provide crucial morphogenic cues to tissues during development and in adulthood, whichare required for the development and maintenance oftissue homeostasis. Transcription factors that determine and maintain endothelial lineage identity are obvious candidate master regulators for these functions.
The talk will focus on the multiple functions of vascular endothelium and on recently discovered pathways that control lineage identity and actively maintain vascular homeostasis. The ETS transcription factor ERGis a critical regulator of endothelial homeostasis and angiogenesis (Birdsey et al, Dev Cell 2015; Shah et al,Nature Comm 2017); loss of ERG results in endothelial-to-mesenchimal transition (EndoMT) and tissue fibrosis(Dufton et al, Nature Comm 2017). Recent work aims to determine the epigenetic pathways controlled by ERGin vascular endothelial cells, and on the identification of endothelial super-enhancers and their role in vascular homeostasis.