Dr Priyanka SharmaGene Regulation, Stem Cell and Cancer program Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona, Spain, Email: priyanka.sharma@crg.eu
Research Interest
I am firmly committed to the translational research and education with strong background
the in Cancer biology, Molecular and Cell biology, Epigenetics and transcription field.
My scientific expertise mainly within the realms of Epigenetics transcriptional
regulations focused on proteins post-translational modifications, DNA methylation and
their structure-to-function relationships in cancer biology. Through extensive training in
Biomedical Science and numerous collaborations, I had been exposed to the work of
multi-disciplinary projects and well trained with advance molecular and cell biology
approaches. During my master of science degree, I had been trained to investigate
functional significance of single nucleotides polymorphisms (SNPs) and their consequent
effect on phenotypes. At the time of Ph.D, along with contributing to genomics studies, I
took initiative to set up the global DNA methylation and target specific DNA methylation
alternation in coronary artery diseases (CAD) patients as compared to control individuals.
Followed by identification of specific DMRs (differentially methylated regions) in CAD
patients in comparison to their healthy controls. Also performed in silico analysis focused
to Homocysteine levels and its implication in several pathological disease conditions
(Sharma et al., 2006, Kumar et al., 2005, Sharma et al., 2008. Halder et al., 2010, Sharma
et al., 2014).
During, Ph.D, I was awarded with Indo?French Ph.D Fellowship (10 Months) worked
at Institute Pasteur, Paris, France with Dr. Christian Muchardt on the project entitles as
?Characterization of double histone post-translational modification (citrullination of
histone H3 at position 8 along with trimethylation of lysine 9 or H3cit8K9me3 mark)
and its impact on transcriptional regulation¨. I got intense training in chromatin biology
and hence demonstrated the the presence of H3cit8K9me3 in vitro and also in human
cells. To investigate functional implication of this newly characterized histone mark, I
worked as INSERM postdoctoral fellow and showed the significance of H3cit8k9me3 in
chromatin-mediated repression in case of Multiple Sclerosis (PLoS Genetics 2012).
I was awarded with Novartis fellowship and joined Miguel Beato group at Center for
Genomic regulation (CRG) on 1st May 2013. During Postdoc at CRG, I worked with in
silico analysis of long non-coding RNAs in breast cancer cells under control of steroid
hormone regulation. Given the fact in recent years, arginine citrullination found to be
associated with number of pathological condition including breast cancer. I used molecular
and cell biology approaches to study fundamental mechanism of transcription regulation in
breast cancer cells. We discovered that a new modification at the CTD, the deimination of
arginine and its conversion to citrulline by peptidyl arginine deiminase 2 (PADI2), an
enzyme that has been associated with several diseases including breast cancer. We show that
among PADI family members, only PADI2 citrullinates R1810 (Cit1810) at repeat 31 of the
CTD, required to maintain the RNAP2 association with the P-TEFb kinase complex.
Therefore, cit1810 establishes crucial differences in the nature of paused RNAP2 to
overcome pausing and allow the efficient transcription of the actively transcribed genes for
cellular proliferation in breast cancer cells (biorvix https://doi.org/10.1101/216143).This
work revealed some flaws in the str