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As Supriya and Prasanth continue to collaborate extensively on several ongoing research projects, they also challenge each other. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Cancer Center at Illinois supported this research. Today, Prasanth and Supriya have labs side-byside in the Chemical and Life Sciences Building, and their students work together as one unit, even though each lab pursues its own unique projects. This study provides mechanistic insights into the regulation of NoRC stability and its implication in rDNA transcriptional repression. In an accompanying paper published in the journal Genes and Development, the Supriya Prasanth lab and collaborators at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center provided structural insights into BEND3-mediated gene regulation. SUMOylated BEND3 stabilizes Tip5, the bona fide component of NoRC via association with USP21 deubiquitinase. BEND3 associates with the nucleolar-remodeling complex (NoRC), a major complex known to establish and maintain rDNA heterochromatin. Prasanth and colleagues show that BEND3 directly binds to rDNA promoter in a sequence specific manner and induces chromatin modifications leading to a transcriptionally repressive chromatin environment. Abid Khan, a postdoctoral associate from Supriya Prasanth’s laboratory, identified a BEN domain-containing protein, BEND3, as a novel transcriptional repressor of rRNA genes. Transcriptional repression of a subset of rRNA genes is essential to maintain equilibrium in ribosome abundance. Several mechanisms ensure controlled transcriptional output from rRNA genes. Therefore, transcriptional output from rDNA directly correlates with cell growth and proliferation and is often upregulated in several cancers.
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Ribosomal RNA (rRNA), transcribed from tandem repeat units (rDNA), forms the major component of the ribosome. The long-term interest of her lab is to understand how the initiation of DNA. Rate of ribosome biogenesis dictates protein translational capacity of cells. Zheng R, Chakraborty A, Freeman B, Wang F, Prasanth KV, Prasanth SG. The main focus of the Prasanth Lab is to delineate how chromatin modulates these fundamental processes. Prasanth and colleagues show that BEND3 directly binds to rDNA promoter in a sequence specific manner and induces chromatin modifications leading to a transcriptionally repressive chromatin environment. Research Chromatin, a complex of DNA and proteins in the eukaryotic cell nucleus governs various cellular processes including DNA replication, DNA repair and transcription.