Grant: Project Grant

During human development, cells behave like building blocks and come together in an organized and well-controlled manner to build the human body. Within this process, we can think of cells as building blocks consisting of support foundations made up of complex interactions between proteins, DNA and RNA. These support foundations determine the choices of whether a cell becomes a blood, brain, or skin cell, or many other cell types that make up a human being. The earliest cell type that can be isolated, grown and studied is an embryonic stem cell. The proposed research aims on understanding how the embryonic stem cell fate changes during this early phase of development and the mechanisms that control such changes. Specifically, we aim to resolve these important fate changes by focusing on RNA and protein interactions with specific sequence elements that are often repeated in the human genome. These repeated elements are often found in RNAs, called lncRNAs, but the function of these elements in lncRNAs is not well-characterized. We will therefore study lncRNA to repeated element links and their role behind building a normal embryonic cell, which ultimately leads to normal development. We believe that our work will provide novel insights into the decisions taken by early cells of our body leading towards healthy human embryo development. Our work will also provide a better understanding of how diseases related to human development occur and possible therapeutic targets or options to treat such diseases.