Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Giles Yeo is from San Francisco and came to Cambridge in 1994 to do his PhD with Prof Sydney Brenner (Nobel Laureate 2002). In 1998 he joined Prof Sir Stephen O’Rahilly as a post-doc in the Department of Clinical Biochemistry, studying the genetics of human obesity. In 2007, Giles became Director of Genomics &Transcriptomics and a group leader at the University of Cambridge Metabolic Research Labs. Giles is also a graduate tutor and fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is also President of the British Society for Neuroendocrinology. His group is interested in studying the brain control of food intake and bodyweight, and how these might be dysregulated in obesity.
Giles is co-leader of Module 2 of the Master’s in Genomic Medicine course. While Giles usually teaches undergraduates, his experience of being a tutor at Wolfson College, which is a mature student college, has been invaluable in influencing his approach with engaging the diverse mature student cohort of the Genomics Medicine programme.
Outside of academia, Giles is also passionate about science communication and public engagement. He speaks regularly at science festivals across the country, including at Cheltenham, Hay and Cambridge festivals. Giles is also an occasional presenter for BBC Horizon. His film ‘Why are we getting so fat?’ screened in June 2016 on BBC2 and garnered more than 2 million viewers. His next film, which tackles the fad diet phenomenon of ‘Clean-eating’ is due out in the first quarter of 2017.
My group’s aim is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the central control of food intake and body-weight. The approaches we have taken include:
1.) Understanding the physiological role of known genetic modifiers influencing food intake and body-weight. The first and most robust of the genes identified by GWAS is FTO (fat mass and obesity related transcript) and we have contributed to characterizing its enzymatic function as a demethylase, identifying and characterizing loss-of-function human mutations and determining its expression and direct role in the hypothalamus influencing food intake. Whatever the explanation for the effects of intronic polymorphism on human adiposity, studies of humans and mice carrying genetic variants that functionally perturb FTO indicate that FTO itself is an important regulator of body size and composition. Recently we have demonstrated a role for FTO in the cellular sensing of amino acids, linking levels to mTOR signalling, and determined that FTO shuttles between the nucleus and cytoplasm, and also that FTO links high-fat feeding to leptin resistance through activation of hypothalamic NFкB-related signalling pathways.
2.) Identifying new players in the hypothalamic control of energy balance. We are interested in mapping the response of different hypothalamic nuclei to afferent nutritional signals, including circulating hormones such as leptin produced from fat and ghrelin produced from the gastrointestinal tract. We utilize either laser-capture microdissection to remove discrete regions of the hypothalamus (Tung et al, J Neurosci 2008; Jovanovic et al, J Neuroendo 2010), or FACS sorting of GFP labelled neurons and couple this to trancriptomic analyses using ‘next generation’ RNAseq.
3.) Developing novel bioinformatic tools, both for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data. We have, over the past few years, developed a novel solution to the processing of next-generation sequencing data, as the handling of such enormous amounts of data currently requires bioinformaticians and the use of expensive high-performance computing (HPC) clusters (Klus et al, BMC Res Notes 2012). We have developed BarraCUDA, a novel sequence alignment software that utilizes NVIDIA graphics cards to map sequencing reads to a reference genome, thus accelerating this process by 300% as compared to a standard workstation. BarraCUDA is designed with the aim of downsizing the NGS software pipeline from complex and expensive HPC clusters down to standard desktop computers.
Deputy Chair, British Society for Neuroendocrinology
Science committee, British Society for Endocrinology
