John Platig, PhD
John Platig, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Genomes Sciences, was awarded a five-year $3.5 million grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for a project titled “Post-transcriptional regulatory networks in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.”
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a leading cause of death worldwide, yet its molecular basis is not well understood. In this project, Dr. Platig and his team will study the COPD-specific effects of RNA binding proteins (RBPs), a class of molecules critical for regulating mRNA as part of its translation into protein. In previous work by Platig’s group and others, it was discovered that over a hundred RBPs are altered in COPD patients, indicating widespread dysregulation of these molecules in COPD. The goal of this project is to identify COPD-specific “rewiring” of the network formed by RBPs and their target RNAs. The cellular consequences of these network changes will then be experimentally validated.
As part of this project, Dr. Platig’s team will develop new machine learning (AI) tools integrate large-scale genomic data and collect state-of-the-art long-read RNA sequencing data from a COPD patient cohort. This combination of cutting-edge computational biology and genomics will allow researchers to better understand how these RBP regulatory networks are dysregulated in individuals suffering from COPD. This project will bring together experts in network science, artificial intelligence, COPD, and RNA biology to decode the molecular underpinnings of COPD.
Filed Under: Research