Rachel Niederer
University of Michigan, MI·Biochemistry·Early-career
Every gene's message, the mRNA, carries a short leading stretch called the 5′ untranslated region (5′-UTR). This stretch does not code for protein but helps decide how much protein gets made.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
mRNA translation
translational control
5′-UTR
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Directly measure ribosome recruitment on thousands of 5′-UTR sequences, the leader regions of mRNAs, that are used differently in cancer cells, to identify functional RNA elements.
- Use computational methods to separate how individual 5′-UTR elements each contribute to ribosome recruitment and protein output.
- Identify the readers, factors that bind functional 5′-UTR elements, through combined biochemical and genetic studies.
- Characterize candidate readers in human cells and determine their role in the translational reprogramming seen in cancer.
More about the research
It does this by controlling how readily ribosomes, the cell's protein-making machines, land on the mRNA. Different 5′-UTRs can change protein output by about a thousand-fold, yet in most cases how they do so is unknown. Faulty protein production is linked to diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration, so learning this 'regulatory code' matters for both basic biology and medicine.
Why it matters
Protein production goes wrong in cancer and neurodegenerative disease. Identifying the mRNA features and reader factors that set protein output could explain how cancer cells reprogram protein production. It could eventually point to new targets for treating diseases driven by faulty translation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yoseph Barash
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Genetics
Identify functional uORFs, short regulatory reading frames in the 5' untranslated regions of genes, and rank them for testing by combining gnomAD, the Penn Medicine BioBank and the UK Biobank.
Jeffery Coller
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biochemistry
Determine how the mRNA degradation complex senses ribosome speed as it changes with codon optimality.
Fadia Ibrahim
Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Biochemistry
Measure how cellular conditions that stall ribosomes change the mRNA fragments produced by ribothrypsis, using transcriptome-wide sequencing methods that capture both ends of each mRNA.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.