Yimon Aye

Aye spent her early life in Burma. Sponsored by the Cambridge Tutors College, she moved to the UK to attend high school. She completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of Oxford and obtained her Master's degree in 2004.[3] She joined Harvard University to study synthetic organic chemistry with David A. Evans, achieving her PhD in 2009.[4] She then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow to work with JoAnne Stubbe. There she performed research into the regulatory mechanisms of ribonucleotide reductase.[5] In 2012, she started as an assistant professor at Cornell University, where she began her work on redox-dependent cell signaling and genome maintenance pathways. During this time, she developed REX technologies, new methods to facilitate the study of unconventional electrophile-regulated stress signaling paradigms.[6][7] REX technologies were one of the first approaches to forge direct links between upstream protein alteration by a reactive molecule and downstream responses.[4]

In 2018, she was appointed as a Assistant Professor of chemistry at EPFL.[1] Since August 2018, she has been leading the Laboratory of Electrophiles And Genome Operation (LEAGO) of the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC) at EPFL.[8]

The Aye laboratory investigates cellular communication processes, in particular electrophile signaling and nucleotide signaling pathways.[9][10][11] The laboratory employs targeted photocaged electrophiles (REX technologies) that allow triggering of protein-specific electrophile-mediated signaling and enable the profiling of electrophile-sensor proteins.[12] They are also searching for ways apply of their findings in drug discovery.[13] A further research area focuses on ribonucleotide reductase, an enzyme present in all DNA-based life and one of the oldest enzymes. In this domain, the Aye laboratory has already discovered novel roles of ribonucleotide reductase, and other enzymes functioning in novel signaling axes, regulated by ribonucleotide reductase.[14]

In 2020, Aye was awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholars Award,[15] the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry by the American Chemical Society (ACS),[16] the Hermann Esterbauer Memorial Award,[17] as well as the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Award for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia.[18][19] In 2017, she received the Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators,[20][21] Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award,[22] and Buck-Whitney Award from the ACS.[23] In 2016, Aye received the Sloan Research Fellowship Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,[24] the Rising Star Chemical Biologist Award from the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS),[25] Rising Star Chemist Award from the Women Chemists Committee (WCC) of the ACS,[25] and Chemical Research in Toxicology Young Investigator Award from the ACS Division of Chemical Toxicology.[26] In 2014, she received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award,[27] National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award,[28] and Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.[29][30]

She is a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s NCCR Chemical Biology Steering Committee.[31]

• Long, Marcus J. C.; Poganik, Jesse R.; Aye, Yimon (2016). "On-Demand Targeting: Investigating Biology with Proximity-Directed Chemistry". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 138 (11): 3610–3622. doi:10.1021/jacs.5b12608. PMC 4805449. PMID 26907082.
• Parvez, Saba; Long, Marcus J. C.; Poganik, Jesse R.; Aye, Yimon (2018). "Redox Signaling by Reactive Electrophiles and Oxidants". Chemical Reviews. 118 (18): 8798–8888. doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.7b00698. PMC 6158072. PMID 30148624.
• Fu, Yuan; Long, Marcus J. C.; Wisitpitthaya, Somsinee; Inayat, Huma; Pierpont, Timothy M.; Elsaid, Islam M.; Bloom, Jordana C.; Ortega, Joaquin; Weiss, Robert S.; Aye, Yimon (2018). "Nuclear RNR-α antagonizes cell proliferation by directly inhibiting ZRANB3". Nature Chemical Biology. 14 (10): 943–954. doi:10.1038/s41589-018-0113-5. PMC 6171530. PMID 30150681.
• Parvez, Saba; Long, Marcus J C.; Lin, Hong-Yu; Zhao, Yi; Haegele, Joseph A.; Pham, Vanha N.; Lee, Dustin K.; Aye, Yimon (2016). "T-REX on-demand redox targeting in live cells". Nature Protocols. 11 (12): 2328–2356. doi:10.1038/nprot.2016.114. PMC 5260244. PMID 27809314.
• Lin, Hong-Yu; Haegele, Joseph A.; Disare, Michael T.; Lin, Qishan; Aye, Yimon (2015). "A Generalizable Platform for Interrogating Target- and Signal-Specific Consequences of Electrophilic Modifications in Redox-Dependent Cell Signaling". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 137 (19): 6232–6244. doi:10.1021/ja5132648. PMC 4528680. PMID 25909755.
• Long, Marcus J C.; Parvez, Saba; Zhao, Yi; Surya, Sanjna L.; Wang, Yiran; Zhang, Sheng; Aye, Yimon (2017). "Akt3 is a privileged first responder in isozyme-specific electrophile response". Nature Chemical Biology. 13 (3): 333–338. doi:10.1038/nchembio.2284. PMC 5586141. PMID 28114274.
• Aye, Y.; Li, M.; Long, M J C.; Weiss, R. S. (2015). "Ribonucleotide reductase and cancer: Biological mechanisms and targeted therapies". Oncogene. 34 (16): 2011–2021. doi:10.1038/onc.2014.155. PMID 24909171. S2CID 205534648.
• Rainka, M. P.; Aye, Y.; Buchwald, S. L. (2004). "Asymmetric Catalysis Special Feature Part II: Copper-catalyzed asymmetric conjugate reduction as a route to novel -azaheterocyclic acid derivatives". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 101 (16): 5821–5823. Bibcode:2004PNAS..101.5821R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0307764101. PMC 395992. PMID 15067136.

• Curtis-Long, Marcus J.; Aye, Yimon (2009). "Vinyl-, Propargyl-, and Allenylsilicon Reagents in Asymmetric Synthesis: A Relatively Untapped Resource of Environmentally Benign Reagents". Chemistry - A European Journal. 15 (22): 5402–5416. doi:10.1002/chem.200900337. PMID 19421982.
• Aye, Y.; Stubbe, J. (2011). "Clofarabine 5'-di and -triphosphates inhibit human ribonucleotide reductase by altering the quaternary structure of its large subunit". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (24): 9815–9820. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.9815A. doi:10.1073/pnas.1013274108. PMC 3116410. PMID 21628579.

• Website of Laboratory of electrophiles and genome operation
• Yimon Aye publications indexed by Google Scholar