Dr. Hai Dang Nguyen

The Nguyen lab focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms of tumorigenesis in cancers carrying RNA splicing factor mutations. They previously showed that RNA splicing factor mutant cancers induce R-loop accumulation, a three-stranded nucleic acid structure consisting of an RNA:DNA hybrid and a displaced single-stranded DNA. The goal of this research is to delineate whether there is a link between altered RNA splicing of transcriptome with where RNA:DNA hybrids are formed in the genome. The group's computational effort currently focuses on developing an pipeline to analyze RNA splicing transcripts from an RNA-seq dataset and genome-wide mapping of R-loops in different cancers.