Boston University biologist, Ana Fiszbein was featured in BU’s research publication, The Brink. Dr. Fiszbein has been investigating mRNA’s potential to treat and prevent cancer, a disease that impacts nearly 1.8 million Americans a year.
The Fiszbein Lab investigates gene expression of mRNA transmitting genetic information from the DNA in the nucleus to the cytoplasm. Dr. Fiszbein uses a dual approach utilizing both biology and computer science to gather data from an entire genome.
Professor Fiszbein elaborates,
“I focus on cancer: what is different in terms of gene expression, the specific expression between normal tissue and cancer tissue. What is wrong, what’s happening, why these molecules’ mechanisms change, what triggers that.”
In addition to her feature in The Brink, Fiszbein’s research study titled “Widespread occurrence of hybrid internal-terminal exons in human transcriptomes” was published in Science Advances. This article describes how differences in messenger RNA isoforms are predominantly driven by alternative exons, however, there are limited tools available for investigating isoform-specific exon usage. To counter this problem, Fiszbein, in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Chris Burge and University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Authma Pai, has built a hybrid-internal-terminal (HIT) pipeline to classify exons depending on their isoform-specific usage.
Fiszbein describes,
“The mRNA processing feeds back to transcription and mRNA synthesis. During cancer progression, there are many genes where we can change this splicing” eventually teaching the body to reject cancer cell proliferation.
If you want to learn more about Ana’s research, here’s the full paper from Science Advances.