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Dr Stephen COHEN, Temasek Senior Investigator

Stephen Cohen studied Zoology at University of Toronto, Canada, before moving to Princeton University for his PhD in Biology. He then moved to MIT to work on Dictyostelium development and later to the Max Planck Institute in Tubigen Germany, where he began to work on Drosophila developmental genetics. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Assistant Investigator and Assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas, before moving to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 1993. He became the head of the then newly-formed Developmental Biology Unit at EMBL in 1996, where his work over the last decade has focused on morphogen gradients, growth control and metabolism and more recently on microRNAS. He will join TLL as Senior PI and Executive Director in July 2007.

You may wish to contact Dr Stephen COHEN at:
Tel: (65) 6872 7000, 6872 7088 (DID) Email: steve@tll.org.sg


For information on PhD studies at TLL, click HERE

Visit the Cohen lab's website HERE

Please request reagents (Drosophila lines, plasmids, antibodies, etc) HERE


Research Interests
  • microRNA
  • growth control
  • metabolism

Research Projects

Growth of tissues and organs during animal development involves careful coordination of the rates of cell proliferation and cell death. The connections between control of cell proliferation and apoptosis in normal development and in cancer are not adequately understood. We have carried out genetic screens in Drosophila to identify genes involved in these processes.

A surprising outcome of this work was identification of genes that encode microRNAs as growth regulators. miRNAs are a class of short RNA molecules that control messenger RNA expression. We have developed bioinformatic tools to identify the target mRNAs regulated by microRNAs and find that the average microRNA regulates hundreds of genes. We estimate that over 30% of all genes are microRNA targets. Combining target prediction with experimental analysis of microRNA expression and production of mutants that eliminate microRNA function is beginning to improve our understanding of the roles that these small RNAs play in evolution and development. For example, the “hippo” growth-control pathway regulates expression of the “bantam” microRNA to promote cell proliferation and to prevent proliferation-induced apoptosis.

The mechanisms that control growth of cells and tissues during embryonic life are closely linked to control of metabolism. Recent work has identified genes implicated in control of metabolism as well as tissue growth. Among these are novel modulators of the Insulin/TOR signaling pathway. Ongoing work aims toward assessing their functions in Drosophila and in mammalian systems.

 

 
 
   
   
   
   
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