In Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, a research team led by Sabeeha Merchant at UC Berkeley has found numerous examples of polycistronic expression – in which two or more genes are encoded on a single molecule of mRNA – in two species of green algae. Go here to watch a video about the work.
Sabeeha Merchant is a faculty scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division and a longtime DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) user. The work was partly enabled by the “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) collaborative science initiative between the JGI and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.