Anuja Kibe email
Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research
Supervisor:
Jun. Prof. Dr. Neva Caliskan (Würzburg)
Promotion Committee:
Jun. Prof. Dr. Neva Caliskan (Würzburg)
Jun. Prof. Dr. Redmond Smyth (Würzburg)
Jun. Prof. Dr. Florian Erhard (Würzburg)
Global discovery and analysis of programmed ribosomal frameshifting in T-cells
Regulation of gene expression at the translational level offers the cell a rapid and efficient response to nutrition, stress, disease and developmental cues. Immune responses, in particular, require precise, dynamic gene regulation at the posttranscriptional level that must activate rapidly as threats rise and resolve efficiently as they disappear. It is a powerful strategy for the cell to program a mRNA to regulate its translation in response to dynamically changing environments, such as during differentiation or infection. Unusual alternative translation, formation of cryptic peptides and functions of trans-frame products remain largely underexplored in immune regulation. My goal is to determine the role translational recoding plays in immune cell responses in HIV infected and naive states and compare the translational signature of these cells by ribosome profiling, proteomics and mass spectrometry. Translational dynamics will be studied using optical trapping and in-vivo fluorescence reporter assays, using the newly discovered frameshifting ccr5 receptor, a co-receptor of HIV on T-cells, as a model system. Taken together this work aims to discover and understand the novel recoding examples in immune cells which can pave the way to develop new therapeutic strategies for anti-virals and human immunodeficiency diseases.