Kelsey Johnson

Our next Baylor University WISE Graduate Student Seminar Speaker is Kelsey Johnson. Kelsey Johnson is working on her PhD with Dr. Joe Taube in the Biology Department here at Baylor University. Her talk is entitled “Probing the epigenetics of EMT to understand cancer metastasis.”

Summary: 90% of cancer-related deaths are due to the development of distant metastases rather than the primary tumors from which the metastases were produced. Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a cell reprogramming event believed to facilitate metastasis of cancers arising from epithelial tissues such as breast carcinomas. In EMT, tumor cells downregulate specific genes such as cell-cell junction proteins to produce a cell phenotype that is invasive and mesenchymal. To effectively seed metastases, mesenchymal tumor cells that have undergone EMT must revert their gene expression back to an epithelial phenotype in a process known as mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition (MET) upon arrival to a distant organ. This research focuses on exploring the dynamic regulation of KDM6A, a histone 3 tail demethylase involved in activating gene expression, during EMT and MET. The oscillation of KDM6A levels during various stages of EMT/MET affects genes involved cell adhesion, differentiation, and proliferation, suggesting that cancer metastasis of epithelial tumors is largely caused by altered epigenetic regulation.