Xiang-Jiao Yang is currently an investigator at the Molecular Oncology Group, Department of Medicine, McGill University Health Centre, and a full member of the McGill Cancer Center, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. He received PhD from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry in 1990 and then moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Maryland, USA, for postdoctoral training with Drs Edith Miles, Seymour Kaufman and Pat Nakatani. At NIH, Dr Yang made a significant contribution to identification of PCAF as the first mammalian histone acetyltransferase in 1996. He joined McGill University as an assistant professor in 1997, received a Harold E Johns award from the National Cancer Institute of Canada in 2002 and became a tenured associate professor at the university in 2003. His laboratory has been actively involved in identifying and characterizing different histone acetyltransferases and deacetylases. In addition, he and his colleagues have recently studied how protein lysine acetylation interplays with other post-translational modifications and forms dynamic intramolecular signaling programs to regulate functions of transcription factors in a coordinated fashion.

Ed Seto is a Professor and Program Leader of Molecular Oncology at the H Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida. After receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of California at Irvine and his PhD from the University of California at San Francisco, he completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Currently, he holds the Ralph R Kaul Endowed Chair for Molecular Oncology Research.

Dr Seto's research interest focuses on understanding gene regulation with a particular emphasis on studying the functions, mechanisms of action and regulation of histone deacetylases (HDACs). Early in his career, two human orthologs of the yeast RPD3 protein (now referred to as HDAC2 and HDAC3) were cloned in his laboratory. Subsequently, he found that many transcriptional repressors function by recruiting HDAC co-repressor complexes to deacetylate histones, and thereby alter chromatin structure and block transcription. He was one of the first to propose the existence of a common, but not universal, transcriptional co-repressor HDAC-containing complex. In addition to his work on HDACs in transcriptional co-repressor complexes, the Seto lab has significantly contributed to the understanding of how HDACs regulate important biological processes beyond histone modification.

Dr Seto has received several awards and numerous grants for his research. His work has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1993.