Masato Yonezawa
Active Motif, Inc. USA
Title: Novel technologies for analyzing epigenome of clinical cancer samples
Biography
Biography: Masato Yonezawa
Abstract
Large-scale cancer genome projects such as TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) and ICGC (International Cancer Genome Consortium) revealed a great number of potential new therapeutic targets among epigenetic factors. This raises the needs for systematic analysis of Epigenomic profiles and epigenetic mechanisms of cancer. Active motif specializes in epigenetic research tools and has developed a series of omics tools to study cancer epigenomes. This study highlights mass spec techniques to identify more than 80 different post-translational modifications of histone proteins, ATAC-Seq, a method for genome-wide identification of open chromatin regions and ChIP-Seq, a method for mapping histone modifications and transcription factor binding sites across the genome. We optimized protocols for analyzing formaldehyde-fixed samples by ATAC-Seq as well as FFPE-preserved samples by ChIP-Seq. Our technologies facilitate the analysis of clinical samples that have been difficult to work with previously. We discuss how these tools can help our understanding of the mechanisms underlying cancer and give insights into diagnostics and cancer therapy.