Specific Gene Expression and Epigenetics

Kasirajan Ayyanathan, PhD, received his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science. Subsequently, at Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, he conducted post-doctoral research on the signal transduction by purinergic receptors, a class of G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCR), in erythroleukemia cancer cells. Next, he was trained as a staff scientist at the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, for almost ten years and studied transcription regulation, chromatin, and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms in cancer. Currently, he is at the Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology as a research associate professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. He is the recipient of the Chern Memorial Award, presented by the Wistar Institute, and Howard Temin Career Research Award, presented by the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Ayyanathan is well trained in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry with a main focus on studying transcription factors and gene regulation. He has contributed to several projects such as the generation of conditional transcriptional repressors that are directed against the endogenous oncogenes to inhibit malignant growth, the establishment of stable cell lines that express chromatin integrated transcriptional repressors and reporter genes to study the epigenetic mechanisms of KRAB repression, and identification of novel SNAG repression domain interacting proteins to understand their roles in transcriptional repression and oncogenesis. Dr. Ayyanathan has published several research articles in peer-reviewed journals in these subject areas.