Professor Dr. David Stanek

I did my PhD at the Charles University in Prague working on ribosomal RNA processing. Then I moved to the US and Germany to investigate spliceosome assembly and nuclear organization. Since 2005 I am a group leader of the Laboratory of RNA Biology at the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague, Czech Republic. My long-term interest is to determine how cells decode the information stored in the genome. In particular, we focus on how spliceosome components assemble in cells and  analyze a quality control mechanism that cells use to discriminate between correctly and incorrectly formed splicing complexes. My team has also studied how chromatin, and in particular histone modifications, regulate alternative splicing outcomes. As a result of our research on splicing and spliceosome assembly, I became interested in a human genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa (RP), which is characterized by progressive loss of photoreceptors. It has been shown that mutations in several splicing factors cause RP, and I would like to understand how the mutations affect spliceosome function, why retinal cells in particular die, and more recently we have started to develop approaches for RP treatment.