RNA Featured Researcher – Michael McMillan, Cellular and Molecular Biology

Michael McMillan Ph.D. candidate Cellular and Molecular Biology Mentor: Dr. Sami Barmada Who/what brought you to science? I became interested in science during jr. high and high school after having three great teachers that promoted experimentation and thinking critically about science. I really enjoyed learning the intricacies of nature so I went on to study…

RNA Faculty Spotlight – Geoffrey Siwo, Internal Medicine

Geoffrey H. Siwo, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine Research Associate, Center for Global Health Equity Website: siworesearch.com Twitter:  @gsiwo   What are your research interests?  My research interests are in accelerating biomedical discoveries and advances in clinical medicine by combining fundamental biology with a broad range of exponentially growing technologies such as artificial intelligence…

After COVID-19, mRNA vaccines could treat flu, HIV and even cancer

By Justin P. Hicks | jhicks3@mlive.com Vaccines to protect against severe illness and death from COVID-19 started as the key to a return to normal, but they could wind up unlocking much more for the future of health care. The mRNA vaccine technology used by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna for their respective coronavirus vaccines has been heavily…

RNA Featured Researcher — Monika Franco, Program in Chemical Biology

  Monika Franco Ph.D. Candidate Program in Chemical Biology Koutmou Lab     What are your research interests? My thesis work is centered around investigating mRNA modifications and how they impact protein translation. Who/what brought you to science? People. People brought me to science. My friends, my family, my professors. It was the idea that…

Arul Chinnaiyan awarded prestigious Sjöberg Prize for cancer research

Renowned U-M researcher is recognized by Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for pioneering prostate cancer discovery ANN ARBOR, Michigan — Arul M. Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., S.P. Hicks Professor of Pathology and Urology at Michigan Medicine, was awarded the 2022 Sjöberg Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which also awards Nobel Prizes. Chinnaiyan is…

Rajesh Rao, Michigan Medicine

  Rajesh Rao, M.D. Leonard G Miller Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Associate Professor of Pathology Associate Professor of Human Genetics Medical School Website Dr. Rao is interested in the mechanisms that control the normal development of stem cells into retinal cells, and how they are involved…

|

Koutmou and Koutmos results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

A University of Michigan team of biochemists, led by Kristin Koutmou, Ph.D., and Markos Koutmos, Ph.D., Assistant Professors in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biophysics, is reframing the understanding of the biology of a class of enzymes called Pseudouridine Synthases (Pus enzymes). These enzymes modify many types of RNAs, and the Koutmou and…

Bambarendage Pinithi (Pini) Perera

  Bambarendage Pinithi (Pini) Perera Research Assistant Professor Environmental Health Sciences School of Public Health Lab website My primary research interests are in the field of environmental epigenetics, which seeks to identify molecular mechanisms and changes in epigenetic cues that result from environmental exposures at critical times in life, and links of these phenomena to…

CRISPR to KLIPP cancer

While most efforts involving CRISPR are focused on genome editing, the CRISPR machinery could also be used as a molecular weapon to slice up chromosomes of cancer cells. Research has shown that chromosomes may undergo a “catastrophic” event early in the process of carcinogenesis causing multiple breakages. While many cells die in such events, some…

2021-2022 Seminars

Monday, September 13, 4:00 pm, Rhiju Das, Stanford University Monday, October 4, 4:00 pm, Byron Purse, San Diego State University Monday, October 18, 4:00 pm, Tim Stasevich, Colorado State University – Link to recording Monday, November 8, 4:00 pm, Zhonggang Hou & Jun Hee Lee – Link to recording Monday, December 13, 4:00 pm, Paul…

Dr. Rajesh Rao receives a Career Advancement Award from Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB).

Congratulations to Dr. Rajesh Rao for receiving a Career Advancement Award from Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB). The Career Advancement Award assists outstanding early-career vision scientists in pursuit of ongoing research of unusual significance and promise. This one-time award is available to candidates who have already received their first NIH R01 and are collecting new…

|

A publication by Dr. Barmada and his team is “Editor’s pick” of the Journal of Biological Chemistry

Sami Barmada, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Neurology and member of the Center for RNA Biomedicine, with Nathaniel Safren, Ph.D., from Northwestern University, and other UM colleagues, was awarded “Editor’s pick” by the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). This recognition signals “a top-rated paper published in JBC across the field of biological chemistry, as determined by JBC’s Associate Editors, Editorial Board…

|

Unveiling the hidden cellular logistics of memory storage in neurons

Exploring the mechanisms involved in sleep-dependent memory storage, a team of University of Michigan (U-M) cellular biologists found that RNAs associated with an understudied cell compartment in hippocampal neurons vary greatly between sleeping and sleep-deprived mice after learning. Sara Aton, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and James Delorme, a…

Amanda Garner, Ph.D., is awarded the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry 2022 David W. Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry!

Congratulations to Amanda Garner, Ph.D., for receiving the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry 2022 David W. Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry! The David W. Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, awarded in even-numbered years, is intended to recognize seminal contributions by young scientists to medicinal chemistry. The nominee must have had a primary role…

Chase Weidmann, Ph.D., receives a K22 grant from NCI

Congratulations to Chase Weidmann, Ph.D., for receiving a K22 grant from NCI for “Unraveling the MALAT1 lncRNA-protein interaction networks that drive lung cancer metastasis” This project’s goal is to integrate cutting-edge sequencing and quantitative proteomics technologies with cell-based functional approaches to understand how RNA-protein interaction networks of MALAT1 promote metastatic activity in human lung cancers. Chase…

|

U-M study sheds light on how bacteria control their detoxification

By Morgan Sherburne, Michigan News Bacteria need to constantly adapt to compete against other species for nutrient sources and to survive against threats such as antibiotics and toxins. In an effort to understand how bacteria control and regulate this adaptation, University of Michigan researchers from the Center for RNA Biomedicine are examining how RNA polymerase—the…

|

Redefining long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) to study transposons in plants

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) constitute the new frontier of investigation for molecular biologists. However, lncRNA is inconsistently defined, which fails the research community in several ways. In a scientific review [2], Professor Andrzej Wierzbicki from the University of Michigan, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and collaborators challenge the contemporary ways of understanding lncRNAs…