{"id":1738,"date":"2017-08-25T22:12:36","date_gmt":"2017-08-26T02:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry-new\/people\/gxu3\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T13:39:01","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T17:39:01","slug":"guozhou-xu","status":"publish","type":"person","link":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/people\/guozhou-xu\/","title":{"rendered":"Guozhou Xu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Research Program Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Research in our lab focuses on structural and mechanistic studies of protein kinases in various biological processes. Protein kinases are major signal transmitters in eukaryotic cells. There are 518 protein kinases in the Human genome, comprising about 2% of all genes. They are classified into mainly two types of protein kinases, membrane integral receptor kinases and intracellular kinases. The membrane integral receptor kinases function to receive extracellular signals and transmit them across the plasma membrane into the cells, while many intracellular kinases function to relay and amplify the signals in the cells. We chose the Leucine-Rich Repeats Receptor Kinases as an example to understand the general mechanism of ligand-induced receptor kinase activation, and investigate the activation mechanism of IkB kinase to understand the role of intracellular signalling kinases in signal transduction.<\/p>\n<p>Inhibitor of \u03baB kinase (IKK) controls the activation of nuclear factor (NF)-\u03baB transcription factors, which are the master regulators of a wide variety of cellular processes, particularly immune and inflammatory responses. Dysregulation of the IKK\/NF-\u03baB pathway is associated with numerous diseases such as diabetes and cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases; therefore IKK has become an attractive drug target for the treatment of these common human diseases. However incomplete understanding of the structure, mechanisms of activation and substrate catalysis of IKK has severely hampered inventing additional novel strategies as well as improving current strategies to target IKK for disease treatment.<\/p>\n<p>IKK is a large protein complex containing the kinase subunits IKK\u03b1 and IKK\u03b2, and the regulatory subunit NF-\u03baB essential modifier (NEMO, also known as IKK\u03b3). IKK\u03b2 accounts for the majority of the I\u03baB kinase activity of IKK and plays a dominant role in the canonical NF-\u03baB pathway in response to proinflammatory stimuli. IKK\u03ba shares more than 50% sequence identity with IKK\u03b2 and plays an indispensable role in the non-canonical NF-\u03baB pathway in response to a subset of NF-\u03baB-induction stimuli. The activation of IKK\u03b2 entails interaction with NEMO, while NEMO is not required for IKK\u03b1 activation in the non-canonical pathway. NEMO-mediated IKK\u03b2 oligomerization and subsequent trans-autophosphorylation have been shown to be crucial for IKK activation but the underlying molecular mechanism remains to be revealed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":669,"featured_media":2506,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"source":"","ncst_custom_author":"","ncst_show_custom_author":false,"ncst_dynamicHeaderBlockName":"","ncst_dynamicHeaderData":"","ncst_content_audit_freq":"","ncst_content_audit_date":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"group":[219,249],"person_tag":[],"class_list":["post-1738","person","type-person","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","group-faculty","group-structural-and-analytical-biochemistry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/1738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/person"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/669"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/1738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19061,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/1738\/revisions\/19061"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"group","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/group?post=1738"},{"taxonomy":"person_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cals.ncsu.edu\/molecular-and-structural-biochemistry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person_tag?post=1738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}