Research Interests

I am trying to solve the long-standing mystery of how introns significantly boost gene expression in organisms as diverse as plants, nematodes, insects, fungi, and mammals. My work in plants revealed that introns vary widely in their effect on expression, and that the 10% or so of introns that strongly increase mRNA accumulation must be located in transcribed sequences near the start of a gene to do so. Remarkably, introns stimulate expression equally well when the promoter, including all known transcription start site, is deleted. My collaboration with computational biologist Ian Korf yielded an algorithm that accurately predicts the stimulating ability of any plant intron and identified a short sequence that boosts expression in a dose-dependent manner. Nematodes are like plants in that introns must be near the start of a gene to affect expression but differ in that apparently all introns stimulate expression strongly and equally. The challenge is to fit these observations into existing knowledge of eukaryotic gene regulation.

Graduate Group Affiliations

• Plant Biology Graduate Group
• Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Graduate Group
• Integrative Genetics and Genomics Graduate Group