RNA Biology & Translational control in Cancer

RNA is a versatile biomolecule with diverse functions. While rRNAs, tRNAs etc. were known for a long time, the messenger RNAs, which encode for proteins stole the lime light for most of the known history of Cell and Molecular Biology. Now we know that the regulatory non-coding RNAs have an important role to play in mammalian physiology and pathologies like cancer. Moreover, the boundaries and distinctions between coding and non-coding transcriptomes are being breached by the presence of hybrid genes (genes which express both coding and non-coding transcripts), cncRNAs (RNAs with both coding and coding-independent functions) and lncRNAs with small-ORFs (smORFs) which encode micropeptides. Our group works in this interesting area of coding/non-coding boundary, in an effort to understand novel gene-regulatory mechanisms relevant to cancer. Stop-codon dysfunction by natural readthrough or non-STOP mutations is another aspect which we are excited about. Investigating the role of lncRNAs, hybrid genes and stop-codon dysfunction in the context of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), cell migration and cancer metastasis is the focus area and we use cell culture models to investigate these aspects at the molecular level.