Valentina Perissi

Perissi is a Professor of Biochemistry at BU School of Medicine. The major goal of Perissi’s research is to investigate the transcriptional and non-transcriptional functions of various cofactors with a particular focus on their misregulation during disease states such as cancer, diabetes and other inflammatory disorders. Her group has been interested for a long time in the regulation of transcriptional events by corepressor and coactivator complexes and in particular they have focused on the NCoR/SMRT corepressors and its associated proteins HDAC3, TBL1 and TBLR1.

More recently, based on the finding that another component of the same complex, GPS2, was required for the adipogenic differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells, they began investigating the mechanism of its actions in adipogenesis and uncovered a critical, non-transcriptional role for GPS2 in regulating the enzymatic activity of the TRAF2/CIAP1/Ubc13 ubiquitin conjugating complex and therefore inhibiting the pro-inflammatory TNFalpha pathway.  Their goal now is to investigate, both in vitroand in vivo, in tissue-specific mouse models, how the different components of the NCoR complex contribute to broadly regulate the cellular responses to external stimulation by acting in different cellular compartments to modulate hormonal and inflammatory pathways.