Jeschke, Jonathan C.2009-05-272009-05-272009-04-08https://hdl.handle.net/11299/50378Additional contributors: Bernd Rattenbacher; Paul Bohjanen (faculty mentor).One of the most remarkable distinguishing features of living organisms is their ability to fluidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. The advances in molecular biology over the past 50 years have resolved the general outlines this capacity for adaptation on the scale of molecules. We now view an organism’s ability to adapt as the result of many complex programs of gene expression. As a basic science, the improved resolution of these expression programs has proved invaluable in understanding many clinical pathologies, the most dramatic being cancer. My laboratory work has focused on resolving a process cells use, at the level of messenger RNA (mRNA), to turn off genes before functional proteins are made. This enzymatic process involves the break down of mRNA polymers where the degrading enzymes are recruited by specifi c adaptor proteins to specifi c sets of mRNA. One of these adaptor proteins is CUG-binding protein 1 (CUGBP1) and identifying the mRNA set CUGBP1 targets has been a focus of our lab. The degradation proteins which CUGBP1 targets to the mRNA are only poorly resolved. I am using a yeast-two hybrid screen to identify CUGBP1 binding candidates. These candidates will then be con firmed by co-immunoprecipitation and mRNA a ffinity chromatography. This will allow me to characterize the specifi c mechanism of decay elicited by the function of CUGBP1.en-USCollege of Biological SciencesBiochemistryAcademic Health CenterDepartment of MicrobiologyCenter for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational ResearchPresentation