News
OCTOBER 25-26, 2017: Symposium to be held in honor of Melissa's academic career. See home page for announcement and email Rina with any questions at rina.paladino@umassmed.edu.
OCTOBER 1, 2016: Melissa joined Moderna Therapeutics as their Chief Scientific Officer. Read article
AUGUST 2016 UMass Chan lab member interview: Harleen Saini was interviewed on UMass Chan LabTV.
FEBRUARY 2016 New publication: Redefining the Translational Status of 80S Monosomes. Heyer, Erin E. and Moore, Melissa J. Cell. 2016 Feb 11.
JANUARY 2016 Thesis Defense: Eric Anderson successfully defended his thesis entitled "Single Molecule Visualization of the DEAH-Box ARPase Prp22 Interacting with the Spliceosome".
OCTOBER 2015 Thesis Defense: Erin Heyer successfully defended her thesis entitled "Optimizing RNA Library Preparation to Redefine the Translational Status of 80S Monosomes".
JULY 2014 Poster Prize: Harleen Saini, Graduate Student, has been awarded one of the four poster prizes at the Gordon Research Conference Post-Transcriptional Gene Regulation meeting on July 13-18, 2014 for the poster entitled, "Investigating the function of retained introns in neuronal mRNAs".
JUNE 2014 New publication: Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in innate immunity. Nature Reviews Immunology, published June 2014, 10.1038/nri3682
MAY 21, 2014 Thesis Defense: Christian Roy successfully defended his thesis entitled "Putting the Pieces Together: Exons and piRNAs".
FEBRUARY 2014 New publication: The spliceosome: disorder and dynamics defined. Weijun Chen and Melissa J Moore. Curr Opin Struct Bio, published February 2014.
FEBRUARY 6, 2014 Kelly Limoncelli received Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Predoctoral Fellows from NIH. The purpose of this training fellowship is to provide support for promising doctoral candidates who will be performing dissertation research and training in scientific health-related fields relevant to the missions of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) during the tenure of the award. Her project title is “Investigating the functional roles of RPS3 in RNA and DNA damage”. For details, click here.
JANUARY 17, 2014 New publication: Endogenous U2·U5·U6 snRNA complexes in S. pombe are intron lariat spliceosomes. Weijun Chen, Hennady P. Shulha, Ami Ashar-Patel, Jing Yan, Karin M. Green, Charles C. Query, Nick Rhind, Zhiping Weng, and Melissa J. Moore. RNA, published 17 January 2014, 10.1261/rna.040980.113 [Abstract].
OCTOBER 8, 2013 Joerg Braun is awarded the 2013 Karl Lohmann Award from The Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) for his doctoral research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Karl Lohmann Award is conferred every second year to reward young researchers under 35 years of age. For details, click here.
AUGUST 19, 2013 Harleen Saini is a 3rd year Neuroscience Program student in the lab and was among only 42 awardees across the nation for HHMI 2013 International Student Research Fellowships.
AUGUST 8, 2013 New publication: ASPeak: an abundance sensitive peak detection algorithm for RIP-Seq. Alper Kucukural, Hakan Özadam, Guramrit Singh, Melissa J. Moore, and Can Cenik. Bioinformatics, published 8 August 2013, 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt428 [Abstract].
AUGUST 1, 2013 New publication: Long Noncoding RNA Mediates Both Activation and Repression of Immune Response Genes. Susan Carpenter, Maninjay Atianand, Daniel Aiello, Emiliano P. Ricci, Pallavi Gandhi, Lisa L. Hall, Meg Byron, Brian Monks, Meabh Henry-Bezy, Jeanne B. Lawrence, Luke A. J. O’Neill, Melissa J. Moore, Daniel R. Caffrey, and Katherine A. Fitzgerald. Science, published 1 August 2013, 10.1126/science.1240925 [Abstract].
6/2013 School Award - Joerg Braun, a postdoctoral associate, was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for his outstanding PhD work on the mechanisms of miRNA-mediated gene silencing from the Max Planck Institute.
Publications published so far in 2013...
Cell Cycle in June - Li XZ, Roy CK, Moore MJ and Zamore PD. (2013) Defining piRNA primary transcripts.
Molecular Cell in April - Li XZ, Roy CK, Bolcun-Filas E, Xu J, Han B, Moore MJ, Weng Z, Schimenti JC, Zamore PD. (2013) An Ancient Transcription Factor Initiates the Burst of piRNA Production During Meiosis in the Mouse Testis.
PNAS in April - Crawford D, Hoskins AA, Freidman LJ, Gelles J* and Moore MJ*. (2013) Single-molecule colocalization FRET evidence that spliceosome activation precedes stable approach of 5' splice site and branch site.
Cell Reports in April - Jokhi V, Ashley J, Nummari J, Noma A, Ito N, Wakabayashi-Ito N, Moore MJ and Budnik V. (2013). Torsin mediates primary envelopment of large ribonuclear granules at the nuclear envelope.
AJOG in March - Maynard SE, Crawford SL, Bathgate S, Yan J, Robidoux L, Moore MJ and Moore TA. (2013) Gestational angiogenic biomarker patterns in high risk preeclampsia groups.
6/2013 HFSP Fellowship Awarded - We are very proud to announce that Joerg Braun was recently awarded a Human Frontiers Science Program Fellowship for his proposal “Single-molecule analysis of human spliceosome assembly”.
12/2012 EMBO Fellowship for Joerg Braun - Postdoctoral associate Joerg Braun in the Moore laboratory was awarded an EMBO Long-Term fellowship for his proposal “Single molecule analysis of mammalian spliceosome assembly”. This fellowship will support Joerg’s work on the molecular mechanism of alternative splicing of pre-mRNAs. Alternative splicing of pre-mRNAs allows the synthesis of multiple proteins from a single gene and is considered as a critical source of complexity in higher eukaryotes, especially in mammals. Joerg is studying the mechanism of splicing in mammals with single molecule techniques in collaboration with the Gelles laboratory at Brandeis University. His work aims to improve our understanding of the regulation of human gene expression and pave the way to address diseases caused by aberrant splicing.
12/2012 Research Article Published in Cell - Singh GS, Kucukural A, Cenik, Leszyk JD, Shaffer SA, Weng Z and Moore MJM. (2012) The Cellular EJC Interactome Reveals Higher Order mRNP Structure and an EJC-SR Protein Nexus. Cell, 151(4); 750-764, November 9, 2012.
12/2012 Published Article in BioEssays - Bicknell A, Cenik C, and Moore MJ. (2012) Introns in UTRs: Why we should stop ignoring them. BioEssays, 2012 Dec; 34(12); 1025-34.
8/2012 Congratulations to Melissa! HHMI has renewed her Investigator appointment for another 5 years!
6/2012 RNA Society Meeting Poster Prize Winner - Chris Roy won the Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology poster prize for ‘Innovation and Interdisciplinary Research’ for his poster titled “SeqZip - A versatile methodology for analyzing long RNAs”.