Professor
Bartel’s research interests center on the regulatory
roles that RNA plays in contemporary biology and the catalytic roles that it
may have played in early evolution. His lab was among those to report the
existence of hundreds of tiny RNAs, known as microRNAs, which can regulate gene expression in animal and
plant cells. MicroRNAs reduce the expression of
protein-coding genes by targeting the messenger RNAs
of these genes for silencing. While searching for silencing RNAs
in fungi, Bartel’s lab discovered another type of
small regulatory RNA, known as heterochromatic siRNAs,
which silence the DNA rather than RNA. In the past few years Bartel and colleagues have developed methods to
successfully predict the genes targeted by microRNAs
in plants and animals. Their computational analyses, coupled with their
experimental results, indicate that microRNAs have a
widespread impact on mRNA expression and evolution.
Dr. Bartel
is an Investigator of the Howard Huges Medical
Institute, a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and Member of the Whitehead Institute. His undergraduate degree in biology is
from