Valadkhan Lab

News

June 2013: Valadkhan lab is featured in the journal Biotechniques in an article focusing on the long non-coding RNA field. See the article: Visiting “Noncodarnia”.

May 2013: Andrew Curtright joins the lab as a research scientist.

April 2013: Valadkhan Lab is featured in the Nature magazine in an article about the scientists active in the field of long non-coding RNAs. See the article: RNA: The genome's rising stars.

February 2013: Mengdi Liu joins the lab as a graduate student.

January 2013: Valadkhan Lab is awarded a grant by the ALS Therapy Alliance for analysis of the function of a long non-coding RNA in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
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Lab Members

Publications

Niazi F, Valadkhan S. (2012) "Computational analysis of functional long noncoding RNAs reveals lack of peptide-coding capacity and parallels with 3 ′ UTRs" RNA 18: 825-843 View PDF. Leave a question/comment

Valadkhan, S. (2011) A SnRNP's Ordered Path to Maturity. Genes & Development 25.15 : 1563-567. View PDF. Leave a question/comment

Additional publications...

Research

A fascinating and unexpected outcome of the recent high throughput studies of the mammalian genomes have been the discovery of thousands of long non-protein-coding transcripts. It has been recently shown that over 70% of the genomes of human and higher eukaryotes are transcribed, but only 1.5% of the human genome codes for proteins. The rest, which is the vast majority of the human genomic output, are non-protein-coding RNAs. The majority of these RNAs are long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), mysterious and exciting molecules which remain mostly unstudied. It is becoming increasingly evident that these RNAs are playing highly critical roles in the cell, and recent data suggests that they form highly complex regulatory pathways that have made the enormous complexity of human body possible. In fact, there are some reports that suggest that these RNAs are responsible for us, humans, being different from other primates!
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