Kathrin Plath, Ph.D.

Kathrin Plath earned her doctorate degree in cell biology from Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) for her work with Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School on how the signal sequence of a secretory protein is recognized by the translocation channel in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. She did her post-doctoral training at the University of California San Francisco and the Whitehead Institute at MIT with Drs. Barbara Panning and Rudolf Jaenisch and support from fellowships of the Life Sciences Research Foundation and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation. In her postdoctoral research, she uncovered that Polycomb proteins can be recruited to their site of action by long non-coding RNAs, and that this group of transcriptional repressors is important for the maintenance of pluripotency and developmental plasticity through the repression of developmental pathways. She joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California Los Angeles in 2006, where her laboratory studies the gene expression controls that operate during cell fate changes. To decode the genetic instructions that orchestrate the conversion of the single cell zygote into a complex organism and uncover broad principles underlying gene regulation, the Plath lab is focusing on cis-regulatory DNA sequences (such as enhancers), long-noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), and the three-dimensional organization of the genome. Research in her lab in the past few years has focused on four fundamental problems: (a) Differentiation and reprogramming processes as mean to understand how transcription factors interpret cis-regulatory elements in the context of cellular state and signaling milieu. (b) The function of long-noncoding (lnc) RNAs in the regulation of chromatin and gene expression by understanding how lncRNA-protein complexes form, localize to regulatory targets, and give rise to phenotypic states. To achieve this goal, we currently focus on the X-inactivation process and its regulation by the lncRNA Xist, how the X-inactivation process differs between mouse and human pluripotent stem cells, and how the epigenetic state of the X chromosome influences developmental potency. (c) 3D-organization of the genome changes as a means to understand how transcriptional networks regulate genome organization, and how genome organization influences gene expression and chromatin states. (d) The deregulation of gene regulation processes in disease using iPSC disease models. To accomplish these goals, the Plath lab uses a wide range of approaches including proteomics, genomics, genetics, cell biology, and bioinformatics. Dr. Plath serves on the editorial boards of various journals including Science, Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Cell Reports, and is the chair of the publications committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. Recently, she was named a Faculty Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.