Jiahui (Chris) Wu, assistant professor of chemistry and IALS translational cohire, and Daisy Pham, graduate student and lead author, have developed an innovative three-color method for capturing images of mRNA inside live mammalian cells.
Because RNA is both incredibly important to human life and health and poorly understood, the ability to tag disparate RNA with different colors and watch them, in real time, as they do their work is a giant step forward in understanding one of life’s basic building blocks. The study appeared recently in Nature Methods.
“We’re very curious about all of RNA’s many functions,” says Jiahui (Chris) Wu, assistant professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, “and the big question is how do you actually study them? The best answer is to actually observe them inside a living cell, but they’re tiny.”