Mechanistic investigation of the cross-talk between spliceosomal complexes and polyadenylation factors

Building an organism requires accurate reading and processing of instructions encoded in the DNA. This task is accomplished by nano-molecular machines able to process the encoded information in a combinatorial fashion, producing a high complexity of the organisms out of a limited set of instructions. Inaccurate processing can cause various diseases.

Two information-processing nano-machines bind one another to act in a coordinated manner, as composite assemblies. The working of these supra-molecular entities is unclear, as we don’t know how all of their working parts look like and how they are organized in space and coordinated in time.

Our goal is to characterize the 3D structure of the composite nano-machines in different snapshots. The vivid picture that would result should enable our understanding of how the information stored initially in DNA is processed at a superior level.