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University of Houston Assistant Professor and his collaborator at the University of Colorado have been awarded a $1.2 million grant to study Z-RNA, an RNA structure important for immune response. They aim to understand its formation, prevalence, and its interaction with proteins involved in RNA editing.
University of Houston Assistant Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Quentin Vicens has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to unravel the mystery of Z-RNA – an enigmatic RNA structure within our cells that plays a critical role in immune response. This work is in collaboration with the laboratory of Beat Vögeli, associate professor at the University of Colorado and co-recipient of the award.
Vicens, Vögeli and their research teams are on a mission to understand how Z-RNA forms, how often it appears in our genetic material and what it means for proteins that are known to recognize this structure. They are focusing on a process called RNA editing, where one letter in RNA is transformed into another. Think of it like changing a letter in a word to make a new word. This editing happens more in conditions like cancer and infections and is linked to the presence of a unique protein part that can attach to Z-RNA.
“Helices come in generally two ‘flavors.’ The typical formation is to the right. The one to the left is not stable, but it does occur in cells. Yet researchers do not yet truly understand how it is possible for this helix to occur in cells when it is not stable,” said Vicens, a faculty member in UH’s College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. “We want to know what happens at the molecular level that causes this RNA structure to flip from one direction