It turns out that FC condensate distribution matters, as disrupting patterning disrupts the hand off of pre-ribosomal RNA transcription to initial processing steps. Condensate patterning (size, number, and spacing throughout the cell) is likely a regulatory dial for multistep cellular biochemistry.
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.
Check out our new work in Cell Systems @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social! Much of the biochemistry in the cell is organized by biomolecular condensates, but what mechanisms control the distribution of a given condensate throughout the cell? And is this mesoscale organization important for function?
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.
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/...
In a great collaboration between physicists (@andriygoychuk.bsky.social, Mehran Kardar, and Arup Chakraborty), we find RNA synthesis creates a non-equilibrium state in the nucleolus that prevents coarsening of fibrillar centers (inner most nucleolar condensate) and patterns them akin to a lattice.
🆕 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...