Shankar Balasubramanian has been awarded an ERC Advanced grant to study the existence and biological function of four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes in human cells.
For over a decade, the Balasubramanian group’s research programme has focused on the chemical biology of nucleic acids. The structure of nucleic acids is key to their biological functions, and the four-stranded guanine rich class of structures called G-quadruplexes constitutes a particularly intriguing motif. Much of this previous work in the area has been focused on G-qadruplexes in DNA.
Recent evidence suggests a role for G-quadruplex (G4) structures in RNA leaving their fundamental impact in biology open for exploration. The group’s central hypothesis is that the G4 structural motif, rather than its sequence per se, conveys important function(s) in RNA. They propose to directly address this hypothesis by the experimental identification of functional RNA G4 structures within the cellular transcriptome on a genome-wide scale. In particular, they intend to reveal detailed insights into their functional contributions to: a) translation and b) telomere biology. The proposed programme constitutes an integrated, interdisciplinary approach that combines chemical biology, synthetic chemistry, molecular and cell biology together with genomics.
Professor Shankar Balasubramanian is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Fellow of Trinity College.