Monthly Archives: July 2017

GeneMods, Northwestern University’s Synthetic Biology club, have been producing an informative and entertaining podcast that covers the latest in synthetic biology news. For their most recent episode, “Hello, RNA World!,” they interviewed Julius Lucks to discuss the features of RNA that make it such a fascinating and engineerable molecule. Listen to the podcast on Soundcloud or on iTunes.  

A new paper in Nature by Alexander Green et al. on “Cellular logic computation using ribocomputing devices”  describes a 12-input logic gate that operates at the post-transcriptional level (i.e. as switchable RNA toeholds). IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the world’s largest professional engineering organization, reached out to Julius for his take on the work. ClickContinue reading “Julius is quoted in IEEE Spectrum on “ribocomputing””

The Lucks Lab is hiring a research technologist. If you, or someone you know, is interested in working with a great team of scientists unraveling the RNA sequence:structure:function relationship, this job may be for you! See the job listing here.   Job Summary: The Research Technologist will perform duties in the Lucks Laboratory for RNAContinue reading “The Lucks Lab is hiring!”

Congratulations to one of the first postdocs of the Lucks Lab, Dr. James Chappell, on starting his lab at Rice University! James joins the BioSciences department at Rice as an assistant professor, where he’ll be focused on creating RNA regulators of gene expression, exploring the portability of these regulators in bacteria domain, performing signal processing withContinue reading “Congratulations to James Chappell! Now a Professor at Rice University!”

The group’s paper on Cotranscriptional folding of a riboswitch at nucleotide resolution has been recommended by F1000Prime! F1000, or Faculty of 1000, is a post-publication peer review service which utilizes recommendations from thousands of experts to recommend the most important papers in the field. Our work on Cotrans SHAPE-Seq was recommended by F1000 Faculty Member and structural biologistContinue reading “Our Cotranscriptional SHAPE-Seq paper is recommended by F1000Prime”

Luyi Cheng, a PhD student in the IBIS graduate program at Northwestern, has joined the Lucks Lab for her PhD research! Luyi completed her B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Washington and did undergraduate research in structural biology. She brings her expertise and passion for structural biology to the “RNA world” and will help advanceContinue reading “Luyi Cheng joins the Lucks Lab!”