Shelby Vexler

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Shelby Vexler is a rising fourth year at UC Santa Barbara majoring in Biochemistry and Molecular. Since spring of 2017, she has been working in Dr. Deborah Fygenson’s lab in UCSB’s Physics Department. There, she helps optimize DNA origami devices that can take dynamic measurements of the bend angles induced in double stranded DNA by proteins. As a UCLA Amgen Scholar, Shelby is working in Dr. Douglas Black’s lab, which focuses on understanding how pre-mRNA splicing is regulated. The U2 snRNP is one of the main small nuclear riboproteins that mediates the assembly of the spliceosome, which catalyzes the splicing of the pre-mRNA. However, it is difficult to purify native U2 from high molecular weight extracts. This summer, she is working on purifying an antibody for the U2 protein SF3A3 that can be used to purify U2 from a variety of native human and mouse tissues. Once purified U2 is obtained, the pre-mRNA bound to the U2 snRNP can be obtained and sequenced, determining where the U2 protein is interacting across the transcriptome. Shelby would like to thank the Amgen Foundation for providing this opportunity at UCLA. Additionally, she would like to thank her mentors in the Black Lab for their support of her summer research.

Shelby Vexler is a rising fourth year at UC Santa Barbara majoring in Biochemistry and Molecular. Since spring of 2017, she has been working in Dr. Deborah Fygenson’s lab in UCSB’s Physics Department. There, she helps optimize DNA origami devices that can take dynamic measurements of the bend angles induced in double stranded DNA by proteins.

As a UCLA Amgen Scholar, Shelby is working in Dr. Douglas Black’s lab, which focuses on understanding how pre-mRNA splicing is regulated. The U2 snRNP is one of the main small nuclear riboproteins that mediates the assembly of the spliceosome, which catalyzes the splicing of the pre-mRNA. However, it is difficult to purify native U2 from high molecular weight extracts. This summer, she is working on purifying an antibody for the U2 protein SF3A3 that can be used to purify U2 from a variety of native human and mouse tissues. Once purified U2 is obtained, the pre-mRNA bound to the U2 snRNP can be obtained and sequenced, determining where the U2 protein is interacting across the transcriptome.

Shelby would like to thank the Amgen Foundation for providing this opportunity at UCLA. Additionally, she would like to thank her mentors in the Black Lab for their support of her summer research.