Joel G Belasco
New York University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
How long a messenger RNA survives inside a cell sets how much protein gets made from it, which makes RNA degradation a basic control knob on gene expression in every organism. This work asks what determines mRNA lifetime in bacteria, focusing on the 5′ end of the molecule — the starting end, which acts as a handle for the enzymes that destroy it.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Genetics
- Topics
mRNA degradation
RNA decay
RNase E
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Determine the structural and phylogenetic diversity of 5′ caps on bacterial messenger RNA, chemical modifications only recently found outside eukaryotes, across bacterial species.
- Test how capping of bacterial mRNA is connected to cell physiology and to stress conditions, and how caps influence rates of message degradation.
- Determine the molecular mechanism by which the regulatory endonuclease RNase E scans monophosphorylated RNA from its 5′ end to locate cleavage sites, using biochemical and biophysical approaches.
- Assess how the cellular environment affects RNase E's scanning search and define the breadth of its regulatory impact on gene expression, using molecular biological and genetic methods.
More about the research
Two features are under examination. The first is capping: chemical caps on RNA 5′ ends were long assumed to exist only in organisms like ours, but caps of several kinds have now been found in bacteria, and what they do is largely unexplained. The second is RNase E, a regulatory enzyme that cuts RNA internally and has been shown to find its cut sites in RNA bearing a single 5′ phosphate by a scanning mechanism resembling sliding along the molecule from the 5′ end — a process whose workings are unknown.
Why it matters
mRNA decay in bacteria has been tied to how pathogens cause infection and how sensitive they are to antibiotics, so defining the rules that set transcript lifetimes could inform efforts to understand or counter bacterial infection and drug resistance. Because the same principles and methods apply broadly, the work may also sharpen understanding of how RNA degradation shapes gene expression in human cells.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Weifeng Gu
University of California-Riverside, CA·Genetics
Identify the messenger RNA and lincRNA targets of the RNA polyphosphatase PIR-2, an enzyme that trims phosphates from new RNA ends, in C. elegans.
Guillaume Chanfreau
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biochemistry
Determine how nuclear ribonucleases, including the RNA exosome, RNase III and the Rex exonucleases, regulate expression of chromatin remodeling factors such as bromodomain proteins when cells are placed under stress.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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