Bartel Lab

Beyond the Gene is a collection of pieces across storytelling mediums--text, audio, and video--that together paint a picture of how current research at Whitehead Institute is expanding the understanding of gene regulation.

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. 

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.