Joachim Lingner (born 1962) is a Swiss molecular biologist. He holds the professorship for life sciences and leads the Lingner Lab at the

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

(EPFL).

Career

Lingner obtained his PhD from the Biozentrum of the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis'', German: ''Universität Basel'') is a university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest surviving universit ...

in 1992. In 1993 he joined the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sys ...

for postdoctoral studies under the supervision of

Thomas Cech Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947) is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, ...

. He then joined Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, first as a junior group leader in 1997 and became senior group leader in 2002. In 2005 he was appointed as associate professor at EPF Lausanne. Since 2009, Lingner is a full professor at EPF Lausanne.

Research

The Lingner Lab studies of the structure, function and maintenance of

telomere A telomere (; ) is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences associated with specialized proteins at the ends of linear chromosomes. Although there are different architectures, telomeres, in a broad sense, are a widespread genetic feature mos ...

s, the

nucleoprotein Nucleoproteins are proteins conjugated with nucleic acids (either DNA or RNA). Typical nucleoproteins include ribosomes, nucleosomes and viral nucleocapsid proteins. Structures Nucleoproteins tend to be positively charged, facilitating inte ...

complexes at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that enable chromosome stability and that regulate cellular lifespan. They elucidated how

shortening is counteracted by the

telomerase Telomerase, also called terminal transferase, is a ribonucleoprotein that adds a species-dependent telomere repeat sequence to the 3' end of telomeres. A telomere is a region of repetitive sequences at each end of the chromosomes of most euka ...

enzyme that renders cancer cells immortal. The lab discovered that telomeres are transcribed into telomeric repeat containing RNA (TERRA), which in turn regulates the telomeric chromatin structure and telomere maintenance by

and homology directed repair. Finally, they developed technologies to uncover the changes that occur in the

telomeric A telomere (; ) is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences associated with specialized proteins at the ends of linear chromosomes. Although there are different architectures, telomeres, in a broad sense, are a widespread genetic feature mos ...

proteome The proteome is the entire set of proteins that is, or can be, expressed by a genome, cell, tissue, or organism at a certain time. It is the set of expressed proteins in a given type of cell or organism, at a given time, under defined conditions. ...

during aging and disease including

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

Awards and recognitions

Lingner obtained the Friedrich Miescher Prize (2002), was elected as an

EMBO Embo ( gd, Eurabol, IPA: �iaɾəpɔɫ̪ is a village in the Highland Council Area in Scotland and the former postal county of Sutherland, about north-northeast of Dornoch. On 16 July 1988, Embo declared itself independent from the rest of the ...

member (2005), and received an ERC advanced investigator award (2008), and is a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

(2020). He serves as a member of the scientific advisory board in the Center of Integrative Genomics (CIG) of the

University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne (UNIL; french: links=no, Université de Lausanne) in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of Protestant theology, before being made a university in 1890. The university is the second oldest in Switzer ...

, and has been a member of ERC starting grant review panel.https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/erc_2018_stg_panel_members.pdf

Selected works

* Feretzaki M, Pospisilova M, Valador Fernandes R, Lunardi T, Krejci L, Lingner J. Rad51-dependent recruitment of TERRA lncRNA to telomeres through R-loops. Nature, Article, in press. * * * * * * *

References

External links

Website of the Lingner Lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lingner, Joachim Swiss biologists 1962 births Living people Members of Academia Europaea Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne University of Basel alumni