Fall 2025 Grantee Highlight:
Shixin Liu

Shixin Liu, PhD

Associate Professor, Laboratory of Nanoscale Biophysics and Biochemistry, The Rockefeller University

Normal development and cellular function require precise control over gene activation and RNA production. Equally important, but far less understood, is the rate at which RNA chains grow during transcription. The molecular machinery that drives this process, known as the transcription elongation complex (EC), is a dynamic assembly of moving parts that must be precisely coordinated as it travels along the chromosome.

Using a powerful single-molecule platform recently developed in the Liu Lab, this project will track the formation of individual human ECs and follow their movement along DNA in real time. Many components of the EC and its regulatory factors are mutated in developmental disorders and cancer, underscoring the importance of deciphering how this machinery operates and how it fails. By revealing the molecular principles that govern transcription elongation and its regulation, this work has the potential to deepen our understanding of genetic and epigenetic inheritance and inform new therapeutic strategies for human disease.