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.
For about 15 years, Laxminarayana has looked for protein signaling cascades involved in the pathogenesis of lupus. A few years into his work, he found that an RNA editing enzyme was associated with lupus. Since then he has been comparing DNA to RNA sequences to try to figure out how exactly the enzyme changes RNA. In May, he found that it edits the mRNA ...
