Eda Yildirim, PhD, a new faculty member in the medical school’s department of cell biology, is among a growing movement of Duke scientists trying to understand how genes are silenced or activated in both health and disease.
DNA still gets the most press, but what Yildirim finds more interesting is the RNA molecules that interact with DNA in myriad ways to control its operations.
As a tool to understand one part of RNA’s regulation of genes, Yildirim’s lab is focused on the process that silences one of the two X chromosomes found in a female mammal. Female offspring get one X from each parent, but if the genes on both chromosomes were active, all sorts of things could go wrong. So the developing embryo turns off one of the Xs in each cell.