ASBMB Today Careers Connecting metabolism to development, disease and therapy

Annual Meeting

Connecting metabolism to development, disease and therapy

A 2022 annual meeting session on metabolism

By Marian Walhout and Scott Dixon

Sept. 29, 2021

If you are wondering whether metabolism is important, consider the effect of holding your breath while you read through this introduction. Your genome will not change, and your RNA and protein expression patterns will not change much, if at all, but the abundance of numerous metabolites in your body will change substantially within seconds and ultimately produce a physiological response that restores homeostasis.

Metabolism is complex and dynamic, involving hundreds of enzymes and reactions. Versions of many enzymes are found in most living organisms on earth. In development, metabolic processes are central for growth; in diseased tissues, metabolism is altered and contributes to pathology. Symbiotic or competitive metabolic interactions between organisms govern a broad swath of important biology in the immune system and gut. How these interactions are regulated by and coordinated with DNA-based, RNA-based and protein-based mechanisms remains under investigation.

The metabolism field continues a rapid expansion. This session will explore a breadth of models and approaches being used to investigate how metabolism impacts development, homeostasis, disease and medicine.

Keywords: metabolism, metabolites, development, cancer, pathogen, drug action, lipids, cell fate

Who should attend: anyone interested in learning how metabolism impacts development, disease or therapy

Theme song: “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, because it’s all thanks to metabolism

This session is powered by ATP. What else?

Talks

Interplay between metabolism and gene expression — Marian Walhout, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Identifying toxic metabolites and their roles in disease — Dohoon Kim, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Transcriptional regulation of primary and specialized metabolism — Siobhan Brady, University of California, Davis
Interorgan cross talk and metabolism regulation in Drosophila — Norbert Perrimon, Harvard University
Metabolic adaptation to oxidative stress at the host–microbe interface — Stavroula Hatzios, Yale University
Deconvoluting host-gut microbiota cometabolism — Pamela Chang, Cornell University
The tiny pharmacists within: How the human gut microbiome impacts drug metabolism and disposition — Peter Turnbaugh, University of California, San Francisco
Metabolic outliers in human disease — Ralph DeBerardinis, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Lipid metabolism and ferroptosis — Scott Dixon, Stanford University
Too much and never enough: Synthetic excess and metabolic inefficiency of aneuploidy in tumorigenesis — Emma Watson, Harvard Medical School
Uncovering conditional vulnerabilities in cancer — Jason Cantor, University of Wisconsin
The genetics of tumor suppression by p53 — Maureen Murphy, Wistar Institute