Culture Club

In her second talk, Glaunsinger explores gene expression control by viruses like Kaposi’s sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV), a frequent cause of cancer in AIDS patients.  KSHV stimulates degradation of mRNA by encoding a nuclease, SOX, which is able to target a broad set of mRNAs for degradation yet cleaves them at specific sites recognized by a combination of RNA sequence and structure. Glaunsinger then describes how widespread mRNA degradation by viral nucleases such as SOX causes redistribution of RNA binding proteins in the cell and restricts mRNA transcription by RNA polymerase II. Thus, alterations to the rate of mRNA decay can have ripple effects in the cell that influence upstream events in gene expression.

Dr. Britt Glaunsinger is a Professor at the departments of Plant and Microbial Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.