T cells and tears

On the third floor of a molecular biology lab in Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, immunologist Dama Laxminarayana checks his table-top PCR machine, which is humming with samples. On this particular afternoon in his one-room lab, he will load the samples onto a waiting agarose gel. Laxminarayana is researching how certain molecules change in response to RNA editing - a process in which enzymes alter the nucleotide bases of an RNA molecule - and how this editing might be involved in the pathogenesis of lupus.