While some of the human genome codes for proteins that are the building blocks of the human body, as much as 98% of our DNA is transcribed into strands of RNA that scientists don’t know exactly what they are or what they do. But that unraveling the mysteries of these “functional” RNAs may be crucial to understanding and beating cancer.
Structural biologist Yunsun Nam is studying the structure and function of functional RNAs in an effort to throw a monkey wrench into cancer’s engine. She was recruited in 2013 to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Biophysics from Harvard Medical School, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She also became a member of the Harold Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2013.
Read More
While some of the human genome codes for proteins that are the building blocks of the human body, as much as 98% of our DNA is transcribed into strands of RNA that scientists don’t know exactly what they are or what they do. But that unraveling the mysteries of these “functional” RNAs may be crucial to understanding and beating cancer.
Structural biologist Yunsun Nam is studying the structure and function of functional RNAs in an effort to throw a monkey wrench into cancer’s engine. She was recruited in 2013 to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Biophysics from Harvard Medical School, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She also became a member of the Harold Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2013.
Specifically, Nam studies a type of functional RNA called microRNA, because it’s so short—only about 20 bases long. There are thousands of microRNAs in the human genome, and they appear in every human cell and may function as on/off switches for regulating gene expression and thus cellular processes. But in almost every type of cancer, the levels of microRNAs present in the cells are out of whack, either higher or lower compared to normal cells.
Scientists know that microRNAs are integral to disease because they’ve found that tumors will develop in cell lines where they have genetically engineered the cells to make more of some microRNAs. But Nam wonders why the levels of these microRNAs change in disease, and believes that by understanding how the microRNAs are created to begin with, there might be a way to intervene to control them.
In every human cell, DNA is transcribed into complementary single-strand RNA. Then, cellular scissors cut the RNA into smaller strands. It’s these cellular scissors, or RNA processing machinery, that Nam is interested in. She’s using high-resolution X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and cryo-electron-microscopy to obtain three-dimensional pictures of the scissors in action, before, during, and after they cut the RNA.
Nam has found that the scissors require accessory proteins to help them bind to the RNA and cut in the right place. Without the binding protein, the scissors can bind upside down and chew up the precursor RNA. That knowledge could provide an avenue for tweaking the action of the scissors to produce more or less of a particular microRNA—which might eventually provide a therapeutic target for cancer treatment.
“When you have both structural information and biochemical information, you gain better control of the molecule and you can find inhibitors,” Nam says.
Nam received a Packard Fellowship in Science & Engineering in 2013, and was named a Pew Biomedical Scholar by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2014. In total, she has received over $3 million in follow-on funding for her research from private foundations and the National Institutes of Health.
“The CPRIT award provided me the resources and support to do what I felt was the most important thing in this field. It made a huge difference in creating the momentum in my research program,” Nam says. “This kind of generous funding and faith in a big-picture approach is really crucial for making meaningful science happen, not just for the benefit of curious minds, but to put us at a new level of understanding; which I believe is necessary to make real progress in cancer happen.”
Nam received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, and began her postdoctoral training in cell biology at Harvard Medical School in 2006.
Read Less
