Columbia University has received a USD 3.2 million R01 grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to develop new computational and experimental methods for mapping domain-specific interactions between RNA-binding proteins and their target transcripts, with the four-year award running from April 2026 through March 2030.
The project, led by principal investigators Chaolin Zhang and Lei Wang, pairs the Zhang lab's expertise in RNA and computational biology with the Wang lab's chemical biology capabilities to address a resolution gap in current crosslinking and immunoprecipitation sequencing methods. Existing CLIP-based approaches cannot distinguish the binding contributions of individual RNA-binding domains within multi-domain proteins, a class that accounts for roughly half of all RNA-binding proteins in humans. The work is classified as basic methods and technology development research, with stated downstream relevance to interpreting genetic variants in noncoding genomic regions and to RNA-based precision medicine applications.
The NHGRI funding reflects continued federal investment in genomic tool development at the interface of computational modeling and high-throughput sequencing, an area that has drawn sustained NIH grant activity as the field works to annotate the functional significance of noncoding variation at scale.
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