Episode #8: RNA research and its applications: a look towards the future

ASEF Podcast

Which one existed first: DNA or RNA? mRNA vaccines: how do they work? Can such vaccines be used to fight cancer? RNA research in USA and Australia. How can research be improved in Slovenia?
In Episode 8, we talk with ASEF professors Jernej Murn and Boštjan Kobe. Listen as they discuss RNA research.

• Boštjan Kobe is a Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Queensland. Prior to joining the University of Queensland, he was a postdoctoral researcher at St. Vincent’s Institute in Melbourne, Australia, where he also started his laboratory at the end of 1997. Prof. Kobe completed his Ph.D. degree at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, USA. He has been awarded the Minister’s Prize for Achievement in Life Sciences (2001), an ARC Federation Fellowship (2005), the ASBMB (Australian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) Roche Medal (2009), the ASBMB Beckman Coulter Discovery Award (2018) and became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2018. He was the President of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia and New Zealand (2012-2014). He is the Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section D Structural Biology and PLoS One. His laboratory focuses on applying structural biology approaches to understanding infection and immunity.
• Jernej Murn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California, Riverside. Before joining UC Riverside as faculty in 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital. He trained with Yang Shi in epigenetics and RNA biology. Prof. Murn completed his Ph.D. in molecular biology that he shared between the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the CEA Laboratory for Functional Genomics in France.

The ASEF Podcast host is Tanja Janko, a Master's Student of Chemistry at the University of Zurich. She was an ASEF Fellow in 2019 with Dr. Dimitri Krainc at Northwestern University.