Bartel Lab

Whitehead Institute researchers are uncovering new ways that genes are regulated that upend existing paradigms of gene expression and provide important insights into health and disease. This collection of stories and multimedia explores that research.

Kehui “Coffee” Xiang is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member David Bartel’s lab and a Cancer Research Institute Irvington Fellow supported by the Cancer Research Institute. He is investigating regulation of gene expression by RNA. We sat down with Xiang to learn more about him and his experiences in and out of the lab. 

Decades of pioneering plant research at Whitehead Institute have led to biological insights and useful discoveries

Whitehead Institute postdoc receives Hannah Gray Fellowship from Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Researchers at Whitehead Institute have uncovered how small changes in the fish Argonaute (Ago) protein, an RNA slicing protein, that happened in its lineage an estimated 300 million years ago greatly diminished the efficiency of RNAi in these animals, while another ancestral feature, in a critical pre-microRNA, was retained that enabled the microRNA to still be produced despite the fish’s impaired Ago protein.

Whitehead Institute researchers have determined that poly(A) tails on messenger RNAs (mRNAs) shift their role in the regulation of protein production during early embryogenesis. This finding about the regulation of mRNA translation also provides insight into how microRNAs control protein production.