Dynamics and functional roles of splicing factor autoregulation.

Non-core spliceosome components are essential, conserved regulators of alternative splicing. They provide concentration-dependent control of diverse pre-mRNAs. Many splicing factors direct unproductive splicing of their own pre-mRNAs through negative autoregulation.

Ligand-receptor promiscuity enables cellular addressing.

In multicellular organisms, secreted ligands selectively activate, or "address," specific target cell populations to control cell fate decision-making and other processes. Key cell-cell communication pathways use multiple promiscuously interacting ligands and receptors, provoking the question of how addressing specificity can emerge from molecular promiscuity. To investigate this issue, we developed a general mathematical modeling framework based on the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathway architecture.

The context-dependent, combinatorial logic of BMP signaling.

Cell-cell communication systems typically comprise families of ligand and receptor variants that function together in combinations. Pathway activation depends on the complex way in which ligands are presented extracellularly and receptors are expressed by the signal-receiving cell. To understand the combinatorial logic of such a system, we systematically measured pairwise bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) ligand interactions in cells with varying receptor expression.

Accessible Medical Education & TIC: Increasing Equitable Care for Disabled Patients.

An estimated 1 in 4 U.S. adults has a disability, and this number continues to increase.

Two-Color Imaging of Nonrepetitive Endogenous Loci in Human Cells.

Tools for live cell imaging of multiple nonrepetitive genomic loci in mammalian cells are necessary to study chromatin dynamics. Here, we report a new system based on two chromosomally integrated orthogonal irregular repeat arrays and particularly a new general strategy to construct irregular repeat arrays. Briefly, we utilized a "bridge oligonucleotide-mediated ligation" protocol to assemble 8-mer repeats which were then combined into a final 96-mer repeat array using Golden Gate cloning.