Anthony Gerber, MD, Ph.D is Assistant Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Attending Physician on the Pulmonary Consultation Service at UCSF. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and his medical degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. He also completed a doctorate in pathology at the University of Washington where his research focused on chromatin remodeling and myogenic differentiation. He then came to UCSF where he completed his residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Since 2002, he has conducted research in the Cardiovascular Research Institute in the laboratory of his mentor, Pao-Tien Chuang.
Research Interests
I am combining my long-standing interest in skeletal muscle differentiation with translational research on COPD and muscle dysfunction. Through a combination of approaches, the goal of this research is to understand the transcriptional basis for skeletal muscle dysfunction in COPD. I am also investigating the molecular basis for the iterative decoding that characterizes stereotyped transcriptional programs such as those that control branching morphogenesis. For this work, I am using the regulatory region of the gene Ptch1, which is expressed in an iterative fashion during lung branching, as a model to understand the general principles that control iterated gene expression during branching. In addition, I am identifying positively and negatively regulated targets of the Shh signal transduction pathway, which is known to control aspects of lung branching and Ptch1 expression.
Publications
1. Gerber A.N. and Tapscott S.J. 1996. Tumor cell complementation groups based on myogenic potential: evidence for inactivation of loci required for basic helix-loop-helix protein activity. Molecular and Cellular Biology, Jul 16; 7: 3901-8.
2. Gerber A.N., Klesert, T.R., Bergstrom, D.A., Tapscott, S.J. 1997. Two domains of MyoD mediate transcriptional activation of genes within repressive chromatin: a mechanism for lineage determination in myogenesis. Genes and Development, Feb 15; 11: 436-50.
3. Otten. A.D., Firpo, E.J., Gerber, A.N., Brody, L.L, Roberts, J.M., Tapscott, S.J. 1997. Inactivation of MyoD mediated expression of p21 in tumor lines. Cell Growth and Differentiation, Nov 8; 11: 1151-60.
4. Gredinger, E., Gerber, A.N., Tamir, Y., Tapscott, S.J., Bengal, E. 1998. Mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway is involved in the differentiation of muscle cells. Journal of Biological Chemistry, Apr 24; 273: 10436-10444.
5. Cook, D.L., Gerber, A.N., Tapscott, S.J. 1998. Modeling stochastic gene expression: Implications for haploinsufficiency. Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dec 22; 26: 15641-6
6. Yun A.J., Lee P.Y., Gerber A.N. 2006. Perspective. Integrating systems biology and medical imaging: understanding disease distribution in the lung model Am. J. Roentgenol. In press.
7. Gerber, A.N. and Chuang, P.T. 2006. The Hedgehog regulated oncogenes Gli1 and Gli12 block myoblast differentiation by inhibiting MyoD-mediated transcriptional activation. In revision (Oncogene).
