Abstract
Innate immunity offers the first line of defense against infections and other types of danger such as tumorigenesis. Its discovery provides tremendous therapeutic opportunities for numerous human diseases. Delving into the structural basis of signal transduction by innate immune receptors, our lab has recently helped to establish the new paradigm in which innate immune receptors transduce ligand-binding signals through formation of higher-order assemblies containing intracellular adapters, signaling enzymes and their substrates. These large signalosome assemblies may be visible under light microscopy as punctate structures in the µm scale, connecting to the underlying molecular structures in the nm scale. They drive proximity-induced enzyme activation, and provide a mechanism for signaling amplification by nucleated polymerization. These supramolecular signaling complexes also open new questions on their cellular organization and mode of regulation, pose challenges to our methodology, and afford valuable implications in drug discovery against these medically important pathways.
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Wu Hao received her pre-medical training at Peking University from 1982 to 1985 and studied Medicine at Peking Union Medical College from 1985 to 1988. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from Purdue University in 1992 and performed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. She became an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in 1997 and was promoted to Professor in 2003. In 2012, she moved to Harvard Medical School as Asa and Patricia Springer Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and as Senior Investigator in the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Wu Hao has received a number of honors, including Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral fellowship, Aaron Diamond postdoctoral fellowship, Pew Scholar award, Rita Allen Scholar award, New York Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, Margaret Dayhoff Memorial Award from the Biophysical Society, and Purdue University Distinguished Science Alumni Award. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015..
Qiao Qi completed his B.S. degree in the prestigious Yuanpei Program at Peking University and earned his Ph.D. degree with Dr. Xu Rui-Ming at Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he joined Dr. Wu Hao’s laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow. In his postdoctoral training, he focused on the molecular mechanism of signal transduction in innate and adaptive immune responses. In 2013, Dr. Qiao Qi was awarded the Cancer Research Institute postdoctoral fellowship to support his mechanistic studies on immunity and cancer.
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Qiao, Q., Wu, H. Supramolecular organizing centers (SMOCs) as signaling machines in innate immune activation. Sci. China Life Sci. 58, 1067–1072 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-015-4951-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-015-4951-z