Peng Li received B.S. degree from Beijing Normal University (China) in 1987 and Ph.D. degree from University of California at San Diego (U.S.A) in 1995. She then did her post-doctoral training in Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (U.S.A) and Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (Singapore) between 1996-1997. She became assistant professor and principal investigator in the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at the end of 1997. She then moved to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003 and became tenured associate professor in 2005. In 2006, she moved to the Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology (currently School of Life Sciences), Tsinghua University as a professor. She was an investigator of Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Professor of School of Life Sciences in Tsinghua University between (2005-2022)；director of Institute of Metabolism and Integrative Biology in Fudan University (2018-), and director of the Division of Life Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 2016-). Currently, She is the President of Zhengzhou University. Peng Li's research interest is in the area of lipid metabolism and the development of metabolic diseases including obesity and fatty liver disease with special focus on the biogenesis, fusion and growth of lipid droplets. Peng Li has published more than 80 papers and received more than 10000 citations. She has been invited speakers of many international meetings including Gordon Research Conference, conference of International Conference on the Bioscience of Lipids (ICBL) and the FASEB Science Research Conference. She served as an editorial board member of various interactional Journals including Cell Metabolism. She is the Editor-in-Chief of recently established international journal “Life Metabolism”, a steering committee member of the International Conference on the Bioscience of Lipids (ICBL), vice president of Chinese Biophysics Society and president of Chinese Society of Metabolic Biology. She has received important awards including Singapore Young Scientist award in 1999 and Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation prize for Scientific and Technological Progress in Life Sciences in 2012. She was elected Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, elected Fellow of TWAS in 2016 and a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences since 2019.
Sufficient energy storage in the form of neutral lipid TAG is important for survival during evolution. However, excess lipid storage leads to the development of metabolic diseases including obesity, diabetes and fatty liver disease. Lipid droplets (LDs) are dynamic subcellular organelles responsible for lipid storage and control intracellular lipid homeostasis. This seminar will discuss the role of CIDE family in controlling LD fusion and lipid storage. CIDE proteins consist Cidea, Cideb and Cidec (Fsp27) are LD and ER-associated proteins. CIDEs deficient animals indicate that these proteins play important roles in controlling lipid storage in adipocytes, hepatocytes, mammary epithelial cells and skin sebocytes. Further molecular and cell biological evidence suggest that CIDE family proteins are highly enriched at LD-LD contact sites (LDCS) and promote atypical form of LD fusion and growth by initiating a directional lipid transfer from smaller to larger LDs. Several regulatory proteins including Perilipin1 (Plin1) and Rab8a are shown to enhance CIDE-mediated LD fusion and growth. Our recent analyses demonstrate that the condensation of Cidec is formed at the LDCS through membrane constrained gel-like phase separation. Using 3D EM tomography and super-resolution imaging, we reveal that Cidec condensates form a gel-like dynamic porous fusion plate with high plasticity contingent on the sizes of the contacting LDs. Thus, we have uncovered the structural and functional significance of phase separation in mediating membrane contact as exemplified by LD fusion and regulating lipid homeostasis. The molecular and physiological insight of lipid droplet fusion and lipid storage will be discovered.