Non-Coding RNA, Blood Formation & Cell Fate - The Lu Lab at Yale School of Medicine

Transcript

• 00:05Many RNAs inside ourselves,
• 00:08now we recognize as functioning in a non-coding way.
• 00:11The meaning of non-coding means
• 00:13they are not for producing proteins,
• 00:15but they're doing something else,
• 00:17and so we're starting to study what these RNA molecules
• 00:20are doing inside the cells and also inside the bodies.
• 00:27My lab has two major angles of study.
• 00:29One angle study is to study non-coding RNAs in the blood cell system
• 00:34And there's a particular type of non-coding RNA we’re studying currently,
• 00:37it’s the so-called glycosidic RNA.
• 00:39But it basically means the RNA is sugar coated.
• 00:42So it basically has a sugar modification on the RNA molecules,
• 00:45and these modification enables RNA molecules
• 00:49to do things that normal RNA molecules cannot do.
• 00:52So that's one aspect of it that's very interesting.
• 00:54The second aspect of it is almost all RNA inside our body are housed inside the cell.
• 01:00But these RNAs actually appear many times on cell surface
• 01:04on the outside cell surface of cells,
• 01:06which is again a very unusual place where they're supposed to be.
• 01:09So my lab was the first one to show a major function for this group of RNA.
• 01:14They actually control blood cells,
• 01:16how blood cells migrate inside the body in a significant way
• 01:20and now we are really studying their relationship in disease settings,
• 01:25how they controlling disease and how can we can potentially use them
• 01:28as a therapeutic target or be used somehow
• 01:32towards a therapy for human disease.
• 01:35The second area we're studying is what kind of information
• 01:38we can extract from the morphology aspect of tissues or cells.
• 01:42What is the shape of this cell telling us about,
• 01:46you know, this particular sample or this particular condition?
• 01:50We studied neutrophils and looking at the shape of the cells
• 01:53versus what they can potentially tell us in terms of what they're doing,
• 01:56and it's amazing that, you know, there are quite some diseases.
• 02:01We know that these cells look different from other normal conditions.
• 02:05Yet we have very little clue what those shapes are actually telling us
• 02:08and now our research is actually starting to uncover this link between
• 02:14these abnormal cell shapes versus what they are potentially doing to the body.
• 02:22What my lab does is we
• 02:24try to use the best technology to address specific questions we have in mind,
• 02:29and in some cases, we have to develop our own technologies.
• 02:32One example is when we are studying the sugar coated RNA
• 02:36because it’s a new field, the methodologies are quite limiting.
• 02:40So to do anything that's going to be interesting,
• 02:42we, many times, had to invent new techniques to do those things,
• 02:46and that's something also, my lab is actually working on to develop those techniques.
• 02:55For the sugar coated RNA, for example,
• 02:57one thing we're looking at is how these RNAs are dysregulated in disease settings,
• 03:02especially in other autoimmune diseases,
• 03:06because many of these cells we’re studying is immune cells.
• 03:09We also looking at the cancer relationship as well.
• 03:12In that sense, the second aspect is to look at
• 03:15whether they can be used as a way, as a target for therapies.
• 03:20So we're developing new ways to perturb them,
• 03:22or new ways to get rid of them or enhance them.
• 03:26In those ways, we're trying to develop new strategies for disease treatments.