Shanlong Li, post-doctoral researcher in the Jianhan Chen lab and Chen, professor of chemistry and IALS translational cohire, recently announced a new publicly available tool, called iConRNA, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which provides an unrivaled look at the mysterious world RNA. This could help solve the mystery of how devastating diseases develop such as ALS, Huntington's or many cancers.
Part of what makes their model so powerful is that it resolves the balance of the distinct physical driving force of phase separation and can also predict how this balance is tuned under different cellular situations. “It allows you to ‘turn the knob’ of things like temperature and salt to see how they affect RNA’s phase separation,” Chen says.