Jennifer Hurley
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY·Biology·Early-career
Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles that time sleep, metabolism, immunity and many other processes. A molecular clock inside cells drives them, and disrupting the clock is linked to chronic inflammation, metabolic disease and cancer.
- Fields
Biology
Biochemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
circadian rhythms
circadian clock
chronobiology
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Predict where environmental signals enter circadian control of transcription and translation, using computational analysis of time-series RNA and protein data from the fungus Neurospora crassa.
- Biochemically validate predicted points of environmental signal integration into the clock in Neurospora crassa, and develop computational tools for studying biological oscillations.
- Build a Conformational/Temporal Interactome (CiTI) map showing how proteins of the clock's repressive complex form time-of-day assemblies, guided by their flexible, intrinsically disordered regions.
- Test how sex-specific circadian metabolic regulation after gene expression (post-transcriptional) shapes the basal function of immune cells, using fungal and mammalian model systems.
More about the research
The textbook view says the clock mainly switches genes on and off at set times and is shielded from the environment. The lab's projects challenge that view. They ask how environmental signals reach the clock, and how the clock controls proteins directly, beyond gene activity.
Why it matters
Because fungal, mouse and human clocks work in similar ways, these findings could explain how the body clock times human immune responses and metabolism. This could inform chronotherapeutics, treatments timed to the body clock, for conditions linked to circadian disruption such as chronic inflammation, metabolic disease and cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jay Dunlap
Dartmouth College, NH·Genetics
Determine how phosphorylation and interactions among clock proteins cause repression in the circadian feedback loop, and test whether turnover of negative-element proteins matters in the mammalian clock.
Shelley Tischkau
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, IL·Physiology
Test whether restricted feeding, limiting food intake to set times of day, can reset circadian clock function and restore adipose tissue rhythms after the clock is disrupted by chronic activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) by pollutants such as dioxins.
Shahar Sukenik
Syracuse University, NY·Biophysics
Determine when the structural preferences of disordered regions in transcription factors affect their function, by linking ensemble structure to transcriptional activity in live cells.
The school
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: 5 labs on PI Pages, $140M a year on research, 113 research doctorates a year.
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