Lyna Kabbani, PhD

Postdoc

Jeremy R Sanford, University of California, Santa Cruz

Pronouns: she/her

I performed my studies at the University of Bern (Switzerland) where I completed my Bachelors, Masters and PhD degree. During my PhD in the lab of Prof. Mariusz Nowacki, I studied programmed genomic rearrangments in the ciliate Paramecium tetraurelia. The focus of my studies were DNA:RNA hybrids as well as small RNAs, the latter of which guide the rearrangement process in ciliates. I investigated the presence and roles of DNA:RNA hybrids as well as endogenous RNase H1 & H2 proteins. I contributed to the discovery of Paramecium lncRNAs, for which we found roles in DNA eliminaton during genome rearrangments. My studies on DNA:RNA hybrids provided evidence for the proposed RNA:RNA based sRNA scanning mechanism, which is instrumental in marking sequences for elimimination. At present, I am studying the molecular mechanism of IGF2BP3-mediated RISC targeting during MLL-rearranged leukemia in Prof. Jeremy Sanford's lab.