Beilharz Lab research
Collaborations | Student research projects | Publications
About Associate Professor Traude Beilharz
I am a biochemist by training with research published across a spectrum of journals including in Nature, Nature Comms, Genome Biology, Science Advances, Cell, Molecular Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nucleic Acids Research, and discipline specific journals such as RNA. I hold an ARC Future Fellowship and am a winner of the Georgina Sweet women in quantitative biology award (2019).
Since establishing my independent lab in 2010, I have specialized in state-of-the-art technologies for the study of RNA metabolism using custom-built NGS technologies and use these to answer questions fundamental to the control of gene expression. The digital readout available through NGS allows me to answer previously intractable questions in the area RNA processing and the post-transcriptional control.
I lead a diverse research portfolio centred on understanding how RNA 3’-end dynamics control gene expression in space and time. Specifically, I am interested in the way that RNA-processing alters mRNA functionality in health and disease.
My core values are curiosity, a blue-collar work-ethic and a growth mindset.
Our research
Current projects
- Investigating coding and non-coding RNA expression
- Investigating the switch from silence to activation of translation
- An investigation into the host-pathogen synapse
Visit Associate Professor Beilharz's Monash research profile to see a full listing of current projects.
Research activities
The RNA Systems Biology Laboratory asks how cells regulate the birth, life and death of RNA molecules using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).
We are experiencing a major re-think in cell biology. Up until very recently, the major focus in gene-regulation was on DNA and DNA-binding proteins. However, it turns out that RNA is not just a passive intermediary between DNA and proteins; RNA also has structural and regulatory functions in addition to its coding functions. Therefore, the RNA Systems Biology Laboratory is interested in how both coding and non-coding RNA is expressed and regulated in cells, and how the fine-tuning of this expression, which differentiates health from disease, is maintained.
NGS provides a holistic, systems level view of the RNA expression profile in cells, and since disease often leaves signature fingerprints of deregulation on such profiles, NGS can be a powerful diagnostic for various disease states including for cancer. The RNA Biology laboratory uses custom RNA-seq technologies in a diverse set of model organism and cultured-cells to study RNA dynamics. Specifically, we are interested in the post-transcriptional regulation of RNA that determines when, where and how often, mRNA is translated to make proteins. Because we seek to understand how every RNA in our system is regulated, our experiments often have 100s of millions of data-points and thus require the input of computational biologists.
PAT-seq: A high throughput approach to measuring RNA dynamics. We developed PAT-seq (for Poly(A)-Tail sequencing) to measure
genome-wide RNA concentration, the position of polyadenylation and polyadenylation-length in eukaryotic cells. This approach together
with a new bioinformatic data analysis pipeline makes hundreds of millions of individual data-points available to biologists.
Collaborations
We collaborate with many scientists and research organisations around the world. Click on the map to see the details for each of these collaborators (dive into specific publications and outputs by clicking on the dots).
Student research projects
The Beilharz Lab offers a variety of Honours, Masters and PhD projects for students interested in joining our group. There are also a number of short term research opportunities available.
Please visit Supervisor Connect to explore the projects currently available in our Lab.
