Yair Dorsett

B.A., The Colorado College
A Role for AID and microRNA-155 in c-myc to IgH DNA Translocations
presented by Michel C. Nussenzweig

I have had the pleasure of knowing Yair Dorsett for 20 years. I first met him at a dinner party at his parents’ home in Boston. At the time, his father, Dale, was a postdoc in Meselson’s laboratory and his mother, Ziva, worked with Connie Cepko. Although Yair was only about five years old at the time, it was already clear that this was an exceptional kid and that science was in his genes. So I was delighted three years ago when Yair decided to join my lab after a rotation in Tom Tuschl’s laboratory. In Tom’s laboratory, Yair learned a great deal about microRNA expression, regulation and metabolism. He came to my laboratory to begin to ask questions about how microRNAs influence the physiology of lymphoid cells. This had not been an area of focus for my laboratory and I therefore assigned him a “safety” project involving chromosome translocations.

Yair is a highly motivated and hardworking student and was able to complete the “safety” project and publish a paper on the etiology of cancer-causing c-myc/IgH translocations. In parallel and pretty much on his own, Yair went ahead with his microRNA project. Upon arriving in the laboratory, Yair noticed that the 3′ UTR of enzyme that causes translocations, called AID, contains a conserved microRNA binding site. Since AID must be tightly regulated to prevent genomic damage leading to translocations, Yair decided to test whether miR-155 might be responsible for this type of regulation by creating a targeted mutation in the 3′ UTR of AID. This was the first such mutational analysis for any microRNA target gene in mammals and showed that miR-155 does indeed regulate AID and that it does so by regulating AID microRNA half-life.

In addition to his work in the laboratory, Yair found time to meet, get engaged to and marry Janjiao Zhou, who is a postdoctoral associate in the Papavasiliou laboratory. As I said, he works fast.