Ms. Misuzu Hashimoto, 4th year student, published a first author paper “Severe Hypomyelination and Developmental Defects Are Caused in Mice Lacking Protein Arginine Methyltransferase 1 (PRMT1) in the Central Nervous System” in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Misuzu Hashimoto, 4th year Ph.D. program in Human Biology, published a first author paper in The Journal of Biological Chemistry on December 4th, 2015. Protein arginine methyltransferase 1 (PRMT1) is involved in cell proliferation, DNA damage response, and transcriptional regulation. While PRMT1 is extensively expressed in the central nervous system (CNS) at embryonic and perinatal stages, the physiological role of PRMT1 was poorly understood. In this study, Hashimoto et al. generated CNS-specific PRMT1 knockout mice and found that PRMT1 was essential for oligodendrocyte differentiation and further myelination during CNS development. This work is the first in vivo evidence that a methylansferase serves as a key regulator of oligodendrocyte lineage progression.