Project Grant 2243704

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Emerging Frontiers, under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074), provides $932,563 to support research into the discovery of novel functional RNA classes through computational integration of massively parallel RNA-binding protein binding and structure data. The President and Fellows of Harvard College will utilize highly multiplexed approaches to generate transcriptome-wide measurements of hundreds of RNA-binding proteins in a single experiment. Researchers will combine these data with cutting-edge computational and evolutionary strategies to uncover and classify novel classes of non-coding RNAs across the human transcriptome and assess their phylogeny. This award seeks to comprehensively discover and characterize previously unidentified RNA classes in a way that current methods cannot, through the development of new experimental and integrative computational pipelines. Findings will be made accessible through an online database to further scientific understanding of RNA function.