Melissa’s paper has been published in Nucleic Acids Research! A modular strategy for engineering orthogonal chimeric RNA transcription regulators outlines our new approach to creating basic RNA transcriptional regulators that can be used to build genetic networks. The background of the approach can be found here, where we showed how RNA-based transcription attenuators can be configured into basic network motifs. The problem though is how to get more orthogonal regulators that you can use to build bigger networks. In her paper, Melissa outlines how you can use RNA-based translational regulators as sources for sequences to make chimeric attenuators. In the process she learned several design principles for RNA-based transcription regulation, and was able to make a 7×7 mutually orthogonal matrix of regulators.
It’s a great first paper from the lab!
More details can be found here:
M. K. Takashashi, J. B. Lucks. ”A modular strategy for engineering orthogonal chimeric RNA transcription regulators.” Nucleic Acids Research, 2013.
DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkt452 (FREE)
Lucks Laboratory 