HFSP Fellowship for IMP postdoc Vytaute Boreikaite
The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) supports talented scientists internationally with its 3-year postdoctoral fellowships aimed at tackling fundamental biological questions. Vytaute Boreikaite, postdoc with Clemens Plaschka at the IMP, has been awarded HFSP Long-Term Fellowship for her research on mRNA maturation.
HFSP Fellows are empowered to propose and pursue groundbreaking research projects, fostering new perspectives and collaborations across national and disciplinary borders in the life sciences. Among the new Long-Term Fellows is Vytaute Boreikaite, postdoc in the lab of Clemens Plaschka. The prestigious fellowship will support her interdisciplinary research on mRNA maturation for three years.
Messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules convey instructions for protein production within cells. During their production, mRNA molecules are cut up and stitched back together in a process known as splicing. Splicing in human cells is intricate and involves a complex molecular machinery. However, its complexity also presents opportunities for errors that can impact cell function and survival. Boreikaite aims to figure out how such errors occur and how they are resolved in human cells by employing both structural biology and functional analyses.
Vytaute Boreikaite obtained her PhD in Lori Passmore’s lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. For her PhD, she investigated the machinery that initiates the modifications that turn a pre-mRNA molecule into a mature mRNA, encoding a functional protein. In March 2023 Boreikaite joined the lab of Clemens Plaschka at the IMP as a postdoc, where she is now conducting research on mRNA splicing.
The HFSP fellowship will fund her project “Structural basis of the human spliceosome quality control”.
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