The research interests of our laboratory are in the field of protein-RNA interactions. We use molecular biology and biochemistry techniques to produce the proteins and RNAs of interest and biophysical techniques that include NMR spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, circular dichroism spectroscopy and UV-Vis spectroscopy, to analyze the interactions between these molecules.
One project in our laboratory deals with the biophysical characterization of the Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein (FMRP) interactions with G-quadruplex forming RNA targets. The loss of FMRP expression leads to the fragile X mental retardation syndrome, which is the most common form of inherited mental retardation, affecting ~ 1 in 4000 males and ~ 1 in 8000 females.
A second project in our laboratory deals with the biophysical characterization of the 3’-untranslated region of the Hepatitis C virus RNA genome and its involvement in the genomic RNA dimerization and long range kissing interactions with the virus RNA coding region.  Research projects are discussed in detail on our group website.