LENNART PHILIPSON MEMORIAL LECTURE

Yigong Shi

Professor School of Life Sciences, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

When & Where

Lecture hall A1:107a, BMC, Uppsala University, Wednesday, October 22, 2025 at 3:15 pm

BIO

Professor Yigong Shi is a biophysicist and the current president of Westlake University. He received a Bachelor of Science from Tsinghua University in 1989 and a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1995. Yigong Shi has been the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Since 2008, he continued his career at Tsinghua University, where he was appointed Dean of Tsinghua's School of Life Sciences. In 2018, he became the founding and first president of Westlake University, a newly established private university in Hangzhou.

His laboratory combines structural biology, biochemical and biophysical approaches to elucidate the molecular and chemical basis of fundamental cellular events, with a particular interest in spliceosome-catalyzed pre-mRNA splicing, the mechanism of regulated intramembrane proteolysis, and the initiation of apoptosis.

Yigong Shi’s laboratory has been working on the structural elucidation of the spliceosome since 2008. Initially, his lab solved the crystal structures of select spliceosomal components. In the summer of 2015, they published two seminal papers on the intact, functional yeast spliceosome structure at 3.6-Å resolution. Since then, they have reported the cryo-EM structures of the yeast spliceosome in seven states and human spliceosome in three states, which together elucidate the choreography of the assembly and catalysis of the spliceosome.

Representative publications and an animation (https://ygshi.org/research?0) on the spliceosome highlight the essence of this year’s Lennart Philipson Memorial Lecture:

Hang J, Wan R, Yan C, Shi Y. Structural basis of pre-mRNA splicing. Science. 2015;349(6253):1191-8. Yan C, Hang J, Wan R, Huang M, Wong CC, Shi Y. Structure of a yeast spliceosome at 3.6-angstrom

resolution. Science. 2015;349(6253):1182-91. Yan C, Wan R, Shi Y. Molecular Mechanisms of pre-mRNA Splicing through Structural Biology of the Spliceosome. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2019;11(1):a032409.

Welcome!