Bayley McDonald awarded the prestigious Poncin Fellowship!
It’s been quite a busy six months for the Duttke lab, nonetheless, our very own Bayley McDonald was awarded a Poncin Fellowship for the 2025-2026 year! The competitive fellowship is awarded to “aid worthy and ambitious young people who are engaged in medical research at any recognized institution of learning within the State of Washington.” […]
Eva Rickard Awarded Prestigious Goldwater Scholarship
We are thrilled to announce that Eva Rickard, an outstanding undergraduate researcher in the lab, has been awarded the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship! She is one of only 441 students nationwide to recieve this award. We are incredibly proud of Eva’s accomplishments and look forward to her continued success in her scientific pursuits. Please […]
Undergraduate Research Stars Shine at SURCA 2025
We are incredibly proud to announce the remarkable achievements of our undergraduate researchers, Eva Rickardson, Anastasia Martinez, and Ari Wilson, who presented their groundbreaking work at the 2025 Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) at WSU! This year’s SURCA featured an impressive an impressive 233 posters at SURCA. The highly competitive Molecular, Cellular, […]
Plant Enhancers: A Different Story
A new study our lab published in Nature Plants challenges the long-held assumption on how enhancers, key regulatory elements in gene expression, function in plants. It was discovered that unlike their counterparts in humans, enhancers in plants are rarely associated with unstable RNA transcripts. Enhancers are DNA sequences that can boost the activity of genes, […]
Eva Rickard Wins SURCA Gray Award for Alzheimer’s Disease Research
Eva Rickard, a dedicated undergraduate researcher in our lab, recently impressed at the 2024 Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) at WSU. SURCA provides a platform for undergraduates to showcase their research endeavors. This year, the event featured 256 posters, with 66 in the Molecular, Cellular, and Chemical Biology category, where Eva presented […]
NAR Cancer paper in Collaboration with the Roberts lab
A recent collaboration with the Roberts lab has been published in NAR Cancer, revealing that disruption of the cell’s ubiquitin-proteasome system, achieved through FDA-approved drugs for cancer treatment, elevates APOBEC3A levels in breast cancer and multiple myeloma cells. APOBEC3A, known for its role as a cytidine deaminase, is associated with APOBEC-induced mutations observed across various […]
Congratulations Eva on her first place presentation!
Eva presented her research on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia at the CVM Research Symposium on November 2nd. It was a thrilling presentation about how she was able to identify transcription in brains and even identify specific transcription factor binding motifs associated with healthy brains versus those with Alzheimer’s disease. Her hard work and great presentation […]
Bayley’s First Paper Submitted
Bayley’s first paper has been submitted! You can read her preprint at bioRxiv following this link.
Congratulations, Bayley!
Congratulations to Bayley McDonald on the successful defense of her undergraduate and Honors theses — both with distinction!!
Your Blood is a COVID-19 Oracle
Profiling nascent transcription in the immune cells found in our blood throughout acute COVID-19 infection not only revealed key regulatory networks underlying disease progression and thus prognosis of disease outcome, but also that the same transcription factor can have a distinct impact on disease outcome in different immune cell types. Based on these data, it […]
New way to analyze DNA motifs
A new fun software (MEPP) to analyze DNA motifs in a distance-specific manner by Nathan from the Benner lab has been published in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics (link: 10.1093/nargab/lqac075)
How human cells become Zika virus factories
Uncovering a major clue toward developing a pan-flavivirus therapy fueled by csRNA-seq Read the news at https://www.lji.org/news-events/news/post/how-human-cells-become-zika-virus-factories/ or find the paper now published at Nature Communications (link: doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-33041-1)
Do you want to know more about gene regulation in addiction?
In collaboration with the Telese and Benner labs at UC San Diego we used csRNA-seq to capture changes in brain gene expression in rats with addiction-like behavior and control which identified transcription factor-centered regulatory mechanisms implicated in addiction, including those regulated by glucocorticoid receptors in glial cells. And even cooler, no rats had to die […]