Lee Lab
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​What do we study?

      ​Invasion of foreign nucleic acids, including transposon and viruses, is a fundamental threat to virtually the genome of all organisms. Failure to defend against foreign nucleic acids can lead to diseases, including infertility and cancer. Using nematode C. elegans as a model organism, our research have demonstrated a critical role of piRNA, germline enriched small RNAs, in silencing transposons and transgenes with foreign sequences.

​We aim to address three fundamental questions regarding to such a genome defense system:
 (1) How does the organism recognize the invading nucleic acids as “foreign” to mount a defense response?

 (2) How does the organism mark “self” genes to keep them from being recognized? 
 (3) How does dysfunction of such genome defense system contribute to infertility?


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