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Celine HaydenDepartment of Molecular and Cellular Biology • Home Research InterestsAs a molecular geneticist I am interested in how genomes are organized, how gene product levels are regulated, and how these product levels impact the physiology and health of different organisms, from plants, to insects, to humans. To address these questions I am using the considerable genomic and genetic resources available for the model organism Drosophila melanogaster.
There is some preliminary evidence that uORFs are important for the regulation of cancer-causing genes, but they have not been studied on a genome-wide scale in animals. As a PERT post-doc in Dr. Giovanni Bosco’s lab I am using mammalian and Drosophila sequence resources to identify conserved uORFs in vertebrates and invertebrates, and applying this information to the study of regulatory control in Drosophila melanogaster. Of particular interest are uORF-containing oncogenes and the role of uORFs in modulating the level of oncogene protein produced in response to cellular conditions. |
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The Center for Insect Science 1007 E. Lowell Street, P.O. Box
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During my doctoral work, I studied various aspects of post-transcriptional regulation in plants. I undertook a computational project to identify and characterize sequence elements within the genome that may be important for the regulation of protein translation. I focused on 5’untranslated regions (5’UTRs) of mRNA and used a comparative evolutionary approach to find sequences that are conserved over evolutionary time. One element, conserved peptide upstream open reading frames (uORFs), has been shown to regulate expression of the largest, or major, open reading frame (mORF) in response to environmental conditions such as sugar and polyamine concentrations. By comparing rice and Arabidopsis (thale cress) sequences I found that these uORFs preferentially occur in mRNAs that produce mORF proteins required for regulation of transcription, translation and signal transduction.