i3S researcher wins grant to study at Oxford
Joana Machado, a researcher at i3S, has been awarded a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (BIF) Travel Grant, a highly competitive international fellowship intended to support short research stays at world-leading scientific institutions.
With this grant, Joana Machado will join the laboratory of Professor Nicholas J. Proudfoot at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, for two months. There, she will learn and apply the advanced POINT-Seq (Polymerase Intact Nascent Transcript Sequencing) methodology. This technique allows for the high-precision analysis of how regulatory elements present in RNA influence gene transcription.
“With this fellowship, I will learn and perform a new methodology – POINT – developed in Professor Nick Proudfoot’s laboratory at the University of Oxford, which will allow us to understand how the regulatory sequence I am studying affects the transcription of the genes in which it is inserted,” the researcher explains.
The doctoral project that Joana Machado is developing in the Gene Regulation group at i3S, supervised by Alexandra Moreira, focuses on the study of a small regulatory sequence present in messenger RNA (mRNA), which is highly conserved throughout evolution. This work, already published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, demonstrated that this sequence has the capacity to modulate gene expression and is associated with genetic variants related to colorectal cancer.
Despite the advances, many aspects of its functioning remain to be clarified. “My main objective is to understand how this regulation happens, that is, at which stage of the genetic information flow this sequence acts,” she states. The researcher also adds an interest in exploring the sequence’s therapeutic potential: “There is a genetic variant associated with colorectal cancer that contains this sequence, increasing the activity of an oncogene.”
For Joana Machado, this award has a special meaning. “Receiving this grant made me very happy because, in addition to being a recognition of my work, it demonstrates the potential of my doctoral project, which is heavily based on fundamental research.”
The researcher further highlights the positive impact this experience could have at i3S. “I intend to bring the knowledge acquired back to the Gene Regulation laboratory, where I am developing my project, and establish this methodology at i3S, which could be very useful for other researchers,” she concludes.
