Sonja M. Kessler received a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 2005. She obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Biology from Saarland University, Germany, in 2011. From 2011-2019, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Saarland University. In 2012 she received an EASL Dame Sheila Sherlock Fellowship and went to the Medical University of Graz, Austria, to study the pathology of gastrointestinal diseases in more detail. In 2014 she went to Université Catholique de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, where she became introduced in different models for metabolic liver diseases. From 2017-2018 she was a substitute professor of Molecular and Clinical Pharmacy at the University of Erlangen/Nuremberg, Germany. Since 2019, she is Full Professor and head of the Department of Experimental Pharmacology for Natural Sciences at the MLU. Her research interests are the pathomechanisms in chronic inflammatory and malignant diseases. Since 2022 she is the director of the Halle Research Center for Drug Therapy.
Project within the RTG
The role of the intrinsically disordered regions of the RNA-binding protein IGF2BP2 in metabolic-associated liver cancer
Insulin-like growth factor 2 mRNA-binding proteins (IGF2BPs) are a family of RNA-binding proteins mainly involved in RNA stabilization and localization. IGF2BPs consist of two RNA recognition motifs (RRMs) and four K-homology (KH) domains. In addition, an approximately 50 amino acids long intrinsically disordered region (IDR) links RRM2 and KH1 and contains two serine residues that have been described to be phosphorylated by mTOR, thereby promoting translation of IGF2 mRNA isoforms with extended 5’UTRs (Dai et al., 2011). Another smaller IDR links KH2 and KH3. However, little is known about the functional significance of the IDRs, the mTOR-dependent phosphorylation of IGF2BP2, and the target mRNA spectrum modulated by this regulation. IGF2BP2 alters glucose consumption, fatty acid elongation, and lipid accumulation in hepatic diseases including liver cancer (Kessler et al., 2015; Laggai et al., 2014; Simon et al., 2014). Further, IGF2BP2 binds to several transcripts involved in glucose and lipid metabolism (Huang et al., 2019). Thus, we will clarify role of the IDRs in the phosphorylation-dependent functions of IGF2BP2 in targeting metabolic transcripts in liver disease.
Literature references
Dai N, Rapley J, Ange M, Yanik FM, et al. Genes Dev. 2011, 25: 1159-72.
Huang S, Wu Z, Cheng Y, Wei W, et al. Acta Biochimt Biophys Sin. 2019, 51: 743-52.
Kessler SM, Laggai S, Barghash A, Schultheiss CS, et al. Cell Death Dis. 2015, 6: e1894.
