Ryan J. Wozniak, Ph.D.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Medical Sciences Center
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Madison, Wisconsin
PhD (2006) Advisor: Dr. Bernard Futscher
While in the PhD program in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arizona, my research focused on trying to understand the interplay between genetic and epigenetic dysregulation in the inappropriate silencing of tumor suppressor genes in human breast cancer. Additionally, I developed a pharmacologic strategy to successfully reverse these dual silencing mechanisms and restore expression of anti-metastatic genes.
I am currently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison doing post-doctoral research investigating the transcriptional regulation of GATA factors in hematopoietic stem cells. Members of the GATA transcription factor family are capable of both activating and repressing target genes, with GATA-1 and GATA-2 serving as critical regulators of blood cell development. GATA-2 is highly expressed in multipotent hematopoietic precursors and is necessary for their proliferation and survival, while GATA-1 expression is elevated as GATA-2 levels decline during hematopoiesis. GATA-1/2 levels are tightly controlled during hematopoiesis, and perturbations to their normal expression patterns or functions have been implicated in leukemias, lymphomas and myelodysplastic syndromes.
Previous work by our group has defined five conserved regions that assemble GATA factor complexes over ~100 kb of the endogenous Gata2 locus, with GATA-1 and GATA-2 occupying these sites during transcriptionally repressed and active states, respectively. It is unclear, however, whether these regions function independently or collectively to control Gata2 transcription/hematopoiesis. Recent molecular studies in our lab using hematopoietic precursors indicate that individual GATA switch sites can function distinctly, suggesting that despite the common feature of binding GATA factors, these elements have important structural/functional differences. To further address this hypothesis, studies are proposed to dissect mechanisms underlying Gata2 transcriptional regulation in vivo and to identify targets of GATA-1/2 dysregulation in the development of blood cancers.