Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center
Dr. David Corey, professor of pharmacology, graduate student Rosalyn Ram and Dr. Bethany Janowski, assistant professor of pharmacology, have activated certain genes in cultured cells using strands of RNA to perturb the mixture of proteins that surround chromosomal DNA, proteins that control whether genes are turned on or off. The new technique could lead to therapeutics for conditions in which nudging a gene awake would help alleviate disease.