Investigator, Lady Davis Institute
Assistant Professor, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University
Dr. Soleimani's Publications Indexed on PubMed
Dr. Soleimani received his BSc (biology, biotechnology option) from the University of Ottawa in 1998 and, in 2005, obtained his PhD from the University of Ottawa, where he studied the effect of mobile DNA elements on the evolution of the genome in the laboratories of Dr. Bernard R. Baum and Dr. Douglas A Johnson. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Michael A. Rudnicki at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) as a postdoctoral fellow, where he studied the molecular basis of myogenic differentiation and muscle stem cell function. In 2014 he obtained a faculty appointment in the Department of Human Genetic at McGill University and as a principal investigator at the Lady Davis Institute.
Major Research Activities
Muscle stem cells, also called satellite cells are undifferentiated cells that reside within our skeletal muscle tissues and are critical for the repair and maintenance of muscle throughout our adult life. However, during aging and under numerous diseases their ability to repair and maintain muscle tissue is dramatically compromised either because of their depletion or because of the loss of their normal function. Although muscle stem cell based therapies hold great promise for the treatment of muscle wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophies, their clinical applications are limited because of our knowledge gap on how their function is regulated. The focus of our laboratory is to explore novel molecular networks and epigenetic regulators that maintain muscle stem cell function. Key areas of interest in our laboratory are:
1) Epigenetic Regulation of Muscle Stem Cell Self-Renewal and Differentiation.
2) The Effects of Niche Microenvironment on Muscle Stem Cell Function in Aging and in Muscular Dystrophies.
3) Molecular Basis of Myogenic Deregulation in Pediatric Soft-Tissue Tumors, Rhabdomyosarcomas.
Recent Publications
Vahab D Soleimani, Gareth A Palidwor, Parameswaran Ramachandran, Theodore J Perkins and Michael A Rudnicki. (2013). Chromatin Tandem Affinity Purification Sequencing (ChTAP-seq). Nature Protocols 8: 1525-34.
Vahab D. Soleimani, Hang Yin, Arezu jahani-Asl, Christel E.M. Kockx Wilfred F.J. van IJcken Frank Grosveld and Michael A. Rudnicki. (2012). Snail regulates MyoD binding-site occupancy to direct enhancer switching and differentiation-specific transcription in myogenesis. Molecular Cell, 47: 457-68.
Vahab D. Soleimani, Vincent G. Punch, Yoichi Kawabe, Andrew Jones, Jaime J. Carvajal, Joe W. Cross, Gareth A. Palidwor, Christopher J. Porter, Christel E.M. Kockx, Wilfred F.J. van IJcken, Theodore J. Perkins, Peter W.J. Rigby, Frank Grosveld, and Michael A. Rudnicki. (2012). Transcriptional Dominance of Pax7 in Adult Myogenesis is Due to High-Affinity Recognition of Homeodomain Motifs. Developmental Cell, 22: 1208-20.