Immune & Stress Response Mediated by RNA

We seek a precise molecular understanding of how coding and non-coding RNAs facilitate mammalian stress responses. In particular, we focus on stress-activated RNA cleavage mechanisms, which regulate gene expression and control cell fate to eliminate damaged/overwhelmed cells.

Human cells activate these mechanisms in response to a strong mammalian immunogen - double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). We study the molecular machinery involved in this cellular program by X-ray crystallography, biochemistry and biophysics. This work goes hand in hand with cell biology and genomics projects in the laboratory, which employ RNA-seq and custom RNA-seq methods.

Our ultimate goal is to gain fundamental knowledge with clear biomedical implications, which would elucidate the roles of coding and non-coding RNAs in pathogen defense, interferon and inflammatory signaling and autoimmune diseases.

Keywords: Interferon, inflammation, dsRNA, tRNA, Y-RNA, t-RNA fragments, tRFs, Y-RNA fragments, YRFs, autoantigen, RNase L, oligoadenylate, 2-5A, OAS1, OAS3, microRNA, adhesion, apoptosis, lupus, metastasis, EMT.

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