On the morning of May 17th, 2017, at the invitation of Professor Zhou Xiang, Professor David M.J. Lilley from the University of Dundee came to the research group for academic exchange, and gave an academic report on the theme of "Nucleic Acid Structure and Function" in the conference room of the School of Chemistry.
This lecture was presided over by Professor Zhou Xiang. Many teachers and students of the Institute listened to this report with great interest. Professor Lilley is British, but the lecture opened in Chinese to express his love for Beijing, which immediately drew him closer to the audience. Different from the DNA double helix structure, the RNA single-strand structure can be folded into many interesting configurations in the body. Prof. Lilley calls one of the structures through long-range interaction "kink-turns". This structure widely exists in organisms and is rich in important epigenetic modification m6A. The two kink-turns can be assembled together in a certain direction to form a horseshoe structure. This structure can self-assemble into a nanostructure, which is expected to build a nanomachine. In addition, by using X-ray crystallography, Prof. Lilley's research group revealed many patterns of RNA-ribozyme interaction. At the end of the report, Mr. Weng Xiaocheng and several graduate students raised their own questions, which were answered patiently and meticulously by Professor Lilley. The academic atmosphere at the meeting was rich and the audience gained a lot.
Introduction of Professor David M.J. Lilley: He has been a professor at Dundee University in the UK since 1989, was elected as an academician of the Royal Academy in 2001, and won the RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He is currently the head of the nucleic acid structure research group of Cancer Research Center in the UK. His main research work includes: the structure and function of chromatin and nucleosome; Study on the importance of DNA supercoiled structure in gene recombination and its interaction with enzymes; The origin of RNA folding and RNA molecular catalysis has published many influential research papers in Nature, Science and other magazines.
