Speaker

Christine Mayr is an Associate Member of Sloan Kettering Institute in New York. She received her M.D. from Free University in Berlin and her Ph.D. in Immunology from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. During her time as a postdoc in the laboratory of David Bartel at the Whitehead Institute at MIT she became interested in 3'UTR-mediated gene regulation. In her own lab, her research initially focused on the role and regulation of alternative 3'UTRs. This work was recognized as one of the breakthroughs of 2013 by Science Signaling. A few years later, her lab discovered that 3'UTRs can mediate protein-protein interactions of newly translated proteins. This indicates that untranslated regions of messenger RNAs contain genetic information to regulate protein functions. To study this new 3'UTR function in more detail, she received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2016. Currently, her lab studies general 3'UTR functions that go beyond the regulation of protein abundance. More recently, she became interested in the biology of membraneless organelles as motifs in 3'UTRs determine if an mRNA is translated in a specific subcellular compartment. Most recently, her lab found that certain protein-protein interactions can only be established in these particular subcellular compartments and not in the surrounding cytoplasm.

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