Assistant Professor | Carnegie Mellon University | RNA-directed control of transcription and cell fate | Biomolecular condensates
https://labs.bio.cmu.edu/henninger/
Jon Henninger
Did you know that stem cells have unusually large transcription clusters, which disappear upon differentiation? Yes? You paid attention in 2018!
In 2026, we show you that this process proceeds via massive, global shifts in transcriptional control.
advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
🆕 review with @jpunfried.bsky.social out in Nature SMB. Direct roles of lncRNAs in transcriptional activation. What do we understand about how lncRNAs lure Pol2 and set the stage for RNA production, and what do we still miss? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Excited to share the first pre-print from our lab!!
Check it out here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We found that many RNA-binding proteins canonically understood to regulate RNA processing can also function like transcription factors and cofactors to directly regulate transcription.
A huge thank you to the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation and the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation for their support of this work. This would not have been possible without their generous support of fundamental science and early investigators.
RBP activators have activation domains with amino acid enrichments that mirror TF activation domains. This molecular grammar was predictive: we estimate that there could be hundreds of potential RBP activators in the human proteome to complement the ~1600 TFs.
See our handy graphical abstract and article for free here:
bit.ly/4vsl845
Serendipitously, we found the CTD of RPB1, catalytic subunit of RNAPII, can also act as an activator. Synthetic CTD condensates in cells could recruit transcriptional co-activators, suggesting that RNAPII has a non-enzymatic function in transcriptional regulation.
