Pete Mariner,
Founder
During my post-doctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Jim Goodrich in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, I studied the transcriptional repression of Pol II by non-coding RNAs expressed from retrotranposed genomic elements. Although previous work in the Goodrich lab had shown that similar elements in mice repress mRNA synthesis, my work clearly demonstrated that the binding and repressing elements within the human counterparts, Alu RNAs, were separate. Of significant importance, and the reason that this work was published in Molecular Cell, stemmed from the fact that these elements could be rationally interchanged between RNAs in a manner similar to that of protein engineering. Distinct functional domains within the Alu RNA could be combined to create novel functional RNAs. In this way, these non-coding RNAs act like transcription factors. By the end of 2015, less than eight years since its publication, this article has been cited 217 times in the scientific literature.
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