Valadkhan Lab

News

February 2015: Bing Zhang successfully defended his PhD thesis and is now Dr. Zhang. Congratulations!

January 2015: The co-first author manuscript of Hiroto Kambara and Lalith Gunawardane was published in the lncRNA special issue of Frontiers in Immunology.

January 2015: Alberto Valencia joined the lab as a postdoctoral scholar with a fellowship from the Mexican National Board of Science and Technology.
Read more...

Lab Members

Publications

Kambara H, Gunawardane L, Zebrowski E, Kostadinova L, Jobava R, Krokowski D, Hatzoglou M, Anthony DD, Valadkhan S. 2015 Regulation of interferon-stimulated gene BST2 by a lncRNA transcribed from a shared bidirectional promoter. Front Immunol 5:676. link to article

Kambara H, Niazi F, Kostadinova L, Moonka DK, Siegel CT, Post AB, Carnero E, Barriocanal M, Fortes P, Anthony DD, Valadkhan S. 2014 Negative regulation of the interferon response by an interferon-induced long non-coding RNA. Nucleic Acids Res 42:10668-80.link to article

Zhang B, Gunawardane L, Niazi F, Jahanbani F, Chen X, Valadkhan S. 2014 A Novel RNA Motif Mediates the Strict Nuclear Localization of a Long Noncoding RNA. Mol Cell Biol 2014;34:2318–29.link to article

Additional publications...

Research

A fascinating and unexpected outcome of the recent high throughput studies of the mammalian genomes have been the discovery of thousands of long non-protein-coding transcripts. It has been recently shown that over 70% of the genomes of human and higher eukaryotes are transcribed, but only 1.5% of the human genome codes for proteins. The rest, which is the vast majority of the human genomic output, are non-protein-coding RNAs. The majority of these RNAs are long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), mysterious and exciting molecules which remain mostly unstudied. It is becoming increasingly evident that these RNAs are playing highly critical roles in the cell, and recent data suggests that they form highly complex regulatory pathways that have made the enormous complexity of human body possible. In fact, there are some reports that suggest that these RNAs are responsible for us, humans, being different from other primates!
Read more...