Biography
Reshma Taneja is Professor and Head of the Department of Physiology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interest is in gene regulation during cellular differentiation using skeletal muscle as a model system. Her laboratory presently focuses on the identifying epigenetic alterations in rhabdomyosarcoma, a paediatric skeletal muscle cancer.
She received a Bachelor’s degree from MG Science College, a Master’s from MS University, a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science in India; and was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Pierre Chambon at the IGBMC, in Strasbourg, France. Before relocating to Singapore, she was on the faculty of The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
She has published several papers in high profile journals including Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, PNAS, Genes and Development, EMBO J among others. She is recipient of the Scholar Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Basil O’Connor Award in the USA, as well as several awards for Research Excellence, Teaching Excellence and Mentoring at NUS.
Research Interests
The focus of the Taneja laboratory has been regulation of skeletal myogenesis and muscle regeneration. The initial phase of our work was focused on the biology of the bHLH transcription factors Stra13 (Bhlhe40) and Sharp-1 (Bhlhe41) in cellular differentiation and regeneration, and translation to human disease models. The current focus of the lab on chromatin modifiers that were identified to interact with these transcription factors in skeletal muscle biology in two key areas: (A) Epigenetic regulation of muscle differentiation and; (B) Epigenetic aberrations in skeletal muscle tumors (rhabdomyosarcoma) that arise due to a block in myogenic differentiation. The lab was the first to identify the role of the lysine methyltransferase G9a in alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, as well as the histone acetyltranferase PCAF. These findings have shown that small molecule inhibitors targeting G9a activity or PCAF activity are effective in these tumors. Ongoing studies are to explore the role of these and other chromatin modifiers in different subtypes of these tumors and examine how they contribute to the block of muscle differentiation, invasiveness and self-renewal of tumor cells.