Thursday, 23 March, 2017

ERC Grant for Professor Thomas Carell

 

 

CeNS member Professor Thomas Carell is Professor of Organic Chemistry at LMU, and his research focuses on the biochemistry of the so-called epigenetic code – a set of chemical modifications of the canonical nucleosides that make up the universal genetic code, induced by environmental factors and by endogenous alterations in the cell’s differentiation state.

In his new ERC project, “The Chemical Basis of RNA Epigenetics”, Carell will explore how and why organisms chemically modify the nucleoside subunits of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, focusing in particular on messenger RNAs (mRNAs). Such modifications act as a supplementary layer of information, which helps to determine which of the genes encoded in the cell’s DNA genome are active, or susceptible to activation, at any given time. The epigenetic code thus enables the organism to regulate the activity of its genes in a highly flexible manner. This second level of information involves the site-specific chemical modification of the nucleoside subunits that make up both DNA and RNA molecules. About 150 nucleoside variants are now known but, according to Carell, there may well be many more. His goal is to identify as yet uncharacterized modifications and determine their biological functions. The new project promises not only to yield new insights into the structures and functions of modified nucleosides, but could also shed new light on the origin of the genetic code itself. According to the so-called RNA world hypothesis, the era of biological evolution was preceded by a phase of chemical evolution, in which RNA and atypical modified bases are thought to have played an important role. Last year, in a paper that appeared in the journal Science, Carell and his colleagues described a novel reaction mechanism that could have given rise to purines (one of the two types of nucleosides used in the universal genetic code) under prebiotic conditions on the early Earth.