Characterization of posttranscriptional regulatory interactions in response to genotoxic stress

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Landthaler
• Subject Area: General Genetics and Functional Genome Biology ; Cell Biology
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 261661870

Genotoxic stress is a life-threatening event for organisms as it alters the content and organization of the genetic material. Organisms have developed multiple mechanisms to detect and repair DNA damage. Defects and failure in DNA damage response may result in genomic instability and predisposition to malignancies. Understanding of DNA-damage responses at the molecular level may provide new avenues for disease management.We propose to systematically dissect posttranscriptional regulation during the response to DNA damage concerning its molecular composition and architecture as well as its biological functions. We intend to discover mRNA-interacting proteins that show differential binding upon DNA damage, to identify their target transcripts and to characterize how these protein-RNA interactions influence the fate of mRNAs in response to genotoxic stress. Our results will be instrumental to integrate posttranscriptional interactions into cellular DNA damage response gene regulatory networks as well as carry the potential for translational medicine by identifying novel RNA-binding proteins, which might modulate DNA damage responses in pathologies such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants