Divya Ramamoorthy (FRAENKEL LAB)

Identifying ALS Disease Progression Subtypes

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that is heterogeneous in its onset, pattern of spread, and disease progression. Here we have established a Mixture of Gaussian Processes model to identify disease progression clusters from sparse longitudinal clinical data. We show that clusters can follow nonlinear trajectory patterns, are robust to sparse data, and correspond with survival outcomes. Our results characterize the complex disease progression patterns of ALS.

Molly Parsons (BATHE LAB)

A Nucleic Acid Origami Approach to Probing RNA Tertiary Structure

RNA is a biomolecule integral to many biological pathways, typically adopting many different conformations as part of its function. Such heterogeneity in shape becomes particularly apparent with large RNA fragments and makes classical structural characterization techniques noisy and difficult to apply. To enable cryo-EM reconstruction of larger RNA molecules like viral genomes, we are developing nucleic acid origami tools to capture and stabilize a single conformation of RNA at a time.