Bino John Lab

Congratulations to lab members Sang and Elane for their contributions to a Cell paper, on the genome-wide indentification of polyadenylation sites that identified pervasive alternative polyadenylation in human cells. More..

Congratulations to lab member Sang for his joint first author contribution in a Nature paper on the discovery of a new class of RNAs that suggest an elusive, pervasive RNA copying mechanism in human cells. More..

usRNAs, a new class of RNAs smaller than microRNAs discovered (Congratulations to lab members Zhihua, Sang, and Yuefeng!); Follow the details on popular sites or on GenomeWeb

Method to detect usRNAs and other small RNAs including microRNAs now published in Nucleic Acids Res - Congratulations to lab members Sang and Zhihua

The DNA in our cells contains the information for producing many types of molecules in our body. Certain portions of the DNA are first processed into a set of molecules termed RNA. Majority of the RNA was previously believed to be translated into proteins. However, recent studies clearly establish that more than half of the RNAs are not translated into proteins. Such RNAs, termed ncRNAs that originate from the “junk DNA” are crucial in controlling a large number of cellular processes and are now believed to be involved in human diseases that include cancer.

We develop computational and experimental tools to help us investigate three important questions: (1) Which ncRNAs are involved in cancer? (2) Why are the ncRNAs involved in cancer? (3) What are the functions of the most interesting RNAs in cancer? To address these questions, we harness the power of multiple disciplines that include biological, physical, mathematical, and computer sciences to analyze the human genome and the RNA transcripts that are processed from the human genome.

University of Pittsburgh Department of Computational Biology