Structural and Chemical Biology of the Transcriptome
Fulbright Scholar, Universitaet Goettingen, Germany (1987), Yale University, Ph.D. (1992). Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Colorado (1992-1996); Research Innovation Award, Research Corporation (1997); Searle Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (1998-2001); NSF Career Award (2000-2005); Visiting Scholar, National Institutes of Health, NIEHS (2002-2003); North Carolina Health & Life Sciences Promise for Tomorrow Award (2009)
Our laboratory focuses on two central problems in biology:
High-Throughput RNA Structure Analysis
Our vision is to address one of the great remaining and intractable problems in cellular and molecular biology -- that of establishing comprehensive and quantitative structure-function relationships for intact cellular and viral RNAs. We want to make it possible to understand, in detail, the global structure and long-range architecture of all cellular RNAs. To this end, we are developing several high-throughput RNA structure analysis technologies, including Selective 2'-Hydroxyl Acylation analyzed by Primer Extension (SHAPE), with the goal of making RNA secondary and tertiary structure analysis as straightforward, in principle, as DNA sequencing is today.
Structure and Function in the Transcriptome
We then apply these new approaches to compelling, and otherwise intractable, problems in biology. In particular, we use the high-throughput technologies created by our laboratory to study very complex systems that play pivotal roles in cellular function and human disease. Students in the lab meld and, collectively, make use of the methods of physical and mechanistic biochemistry, bioorganic chemistry, structural biology, virology, microbiology, and computational bioinformatics and biophysics. Current projects include (i) RNA folding and protein assembly reactions central to the replication of human viruses, (ii) assembly and function of large and biomedically important ribonucleoprotein complexes inside living cells, and (iii) facile analysis of small molecule binding to RNA.