Gideon Dreyfuss

Dr. Dreyfuss's laboratory is interested in post-transcriptional gene regulation and its central mediators, RNA-binding proteins and non-coding RNAs. The lab's seminal contributions include discovery of the principal nuclear RNA-binding proteins (hnRNP proteins) and their activities in mRNA biogenesis, the major RNA-binding motifs (incl. RBD/RRM; KH domain), and the remarkable dynamics of many nuclear proteins previously thought to be confined to the nucleus-- nucleo-cytoplasmic shuttling mediated by novel nuclear import and export signals and receptors (transportins). The laboratory has also discovered the SMN complex and its unexpected function in assembly of snRNPs, the spliceosome's subunits. Insights from this work and high throughput screening technologies the lab developed are being applied towards drug development for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a neurodegenerative disease caused by SMN deficiency. The lab is also pursuing its recent surprising discovery of U1 snRNP function in nascent transcriptome protection and mRNA length regulation, called Telescripting, and its potential role in cancer, cell proliferation and activation of immune cells and neurons. http://www.med.upenn.edu/dreyfusslab/index.html; http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/dreyfuss.html