Lab receives 5-year R01 funding

June 2, 2018, 1:15 p.m.

Maggie-Lam

We are excited to receive a generous 5-year 1.4M direct-cost funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The funding will support our project to investigate "Alternative Protein Isoforms in Ventricular Modeling".

The human genome contains a large number of alternative splice isoforms which collectively allow our ~20,000 coding genes to produce >100,000 transcripts. Although alternative splicing is broadly implicated in gene regulation in human physiology and disease, the molecular functions of most alternative transcripts are poorly understood and indeed for most scientists do not know which ones are actually translated as proteins or degraded as aberrant transcriptional project.

In the proposed project, our laboratory and our collaborators at UPenn will combine bioinformatics and mass spectrometry techniques to discover alternative isoform expression on a large-scale and examine their changes in heart disease models. The figure above shows some of the alternative protein isoforms we identified in preliminary data and their genomic coordinates.