Dr. Jinwei Zhang

National Institute of Health
Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Friday, October 20, 2023
12:00 Noon
Room 120 – Meyerhoff Chemistry Building
Host: Dr. Deepak Koirala

“Recognition and mimicry of the tRNA fold”

tRNAs are among the most essential and ubiquitous biomolecules in the cell. They represent the most abundant RNA species by the number of molecules. Essentially all residues on the tRNA are recognized by a protein or another RNA. I will discuss recent studies by our group that investigated how the iconic tRNA structure is recognized by bacterial gene-regulatory noncoding RNAs to sense and respond to starvation, exploited by viral proteins to regulate virion biogenesis, and mimicked by metazoan long noncoding RNAs to gain access to tRNA-processing machineries for lncRNA maturation and novel RNA biogenesis.