2020 Johns Hopkins Discovery Awards include Bailey Lab project

Our research project with Joshua Modell’s lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine the Bailey lab has won a 2020 Johns Hopkins Discovery Award! The Discovery Awards are designed to seed innovative collaborations by supporting teams of researchers from different divisions of Johns Hopkins working on new projects. With the award, we will to start a project with the Modell lab, using our complementary skills and expertise to examine a natural single-guide RNA that can interact with Cas9 to make it into a transcriptional regulator.  

The project will build on a discovery (currently in preprint at bioRxiv) by the Modell lab of a long form of tracrRNA (designated tracr-L) that can function as a natural single-guide RNA and interact with Cas9 in place of the crRNA-tracrRNA complex. With tracr-L, Cas9 binds to its own promoter, repressing its expression.  

Though there has been limited research into how CRISPR systems are regulated, it’s an important question: while they provide immunity against threats like phages, they also come with a risk of auto-immunity that could harm the cells. And in fact, cells without tracr-L have higher levels of immunity to phages, but when cultured with cells with tracr-L in the absence of phages, their numbers quickly drop.  

We want to understand how the Cas9-tracr-L complex functions as a transcriptional regulator. The Discovery Award funding will let us establish a collaboration to do so, with the Bailey lab focusing on the structural and biochemical aspects, and the Modell lab using molecular genetics and biochemical methods.  

We’re looking forward to working with the Modell lab on this exciting project and build a long-lasting collaboration!