Lucks

Julius B. Lucks, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a James C. and Rebecca Q. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, has been named a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow.

Awarded annually by the Sloan Foundation, the two-year fellowships support fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars. Lucks was among 126 researchers recognized for distinguished performance and potential.

Lucks, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2011, focuses his research on elucidating and engineering the sequence-structure-function relationship of noncoding RNAs -- a class of biological molecules known to play central roles in maintaining and regulating the genomes of all organisms.

Understanding the relationship between RNA structure and function has been hampered by a lack of suitable high-throughput techniques. To address this, Lucks' group is developing new computational and experimental tools to characterize RNA structures in unprecedented scale.

One technique Lucks' lab is developing is called SHAPE-Seq, which combines nucleotide-resolution chemical footprinting and next-generation sequencing to allow simultaneous characterization of structural information for hundreds of RNA molecules.

Recently, students in Lucks' group have used SHAPE-Seq to discover principles of modularity in noncoding RNA interactions with each other, which is fueling work to use noncoding RNAs to construct genetic circuitry from the bottom up.

Lucks' lab will continue developing SHAPE-Seq techniques; engineering noncoding RNA folding and function; uncovering the role of RNA structures in RNA viruses; and understanding the evolution of RNA regulation.