Home Department: Human Biology
Mentor: Maria Barna (Genetics)

“Ribo-Cannon: A Novel Genetic Approach to Study Ribosomal Proteins”

Christina will help the development of a novel genetic technique designed to assay ribosomal proteins (RPs) and study whether these RPs play active roles in translation. Given the current lack of methods to specifically study these ancient proteins, the project ultimately aims to fill this gap by creating a technique that precisely removes specific RPs from ribosomes post-assembly, and then carry out ribosome profiling to look for differentially regulated mRNA transcripts. The RPs that the Barna lab is studying are known to be important in early mouse embryonic development, suggesting the possibility of future developmental biology applications.