Joan A. Steitz

Almost my entire career has been devoted to discovering and establishing the structures and functions of non-coding (nc)RNAs in vertebrate (mostly mammalian) cells. Prior to that (1968-79), I studied the initiation of protein synthesis in bacteria, including demonstrating the base-pairing interaction between 16S rRNA and mRNA. We discovered the snRNAs of the major and later the minor spliceosome. We characterized snoRNAs and scaRNAs, as well as the U7-dependent 3′-end processing of histone mRNAs. Concurrently, we discovered and have attempted to elucidate the functions of abundant non-coding RNAs expressed in cells infected by primate herpesviruses such as EBV, KSHV and H. saimiri. Our studies of RNA decay identified HuR as a protein that binds AU-rich elements and triple-stranded RNA structures involving the polyA tail as stabilizing elements for RNA. Recently, we have also investigated microRNA biogenesis, function and decay. In 2015, we discovered a new class of human long ncRNAs: stress-induced read-through transcripts (called DOGs for downstream-of-gene RNAs) that arise from ~10% of human protein-coding genes.