Silvi Rouskin, Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology, Harvard Medial School, presents "Alternative Structures of Viral RNA control gene expression and offer therapeutic strategies".

My research program is focused on understanding the role of RNA structure in gene expression and disease. Over the past few years as a Whitehead Institute Fellow and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, I have led an interdisciplinary team of scientists investigating RNA viruses including Human Immunodeficiency 1 (HIV-1) and SARS-CoV2. During graduate school at University of California San Francisco with Dr. Jonathan Weissman, I used leading edge sequencing technology to develop an assay, Dimethyl Sulfate Sequencing (DMS-seq), for probing RNA structure genome-wide inside living cells. My graduate work provided me with substantial experience in computer science, statistics, and biochemistry that was required to design, perform, and analyze high throughput sequencing experiments. Instead of following a traditional postdoc route, I was selected to the Whitehead Fellows program to start my own lab in 2015. My lab established a novel experimental technique for probing the structure of single RNA molecules using mutational profiling: DMS-MaPseq. More recently, the tools we developed allowed us to determine the secondary structure of the entire SARS-CoV-2 genome in infected cells at single nucleotide resolution. My work is driven by the ultimate goal of obtaining a mechanistic understanding of the role of RNA structure in gene expression and disease for the design of novel therapeutic approaches.

Host: Meghan Frederick (mmfrederick@ucdavis.edu)