Non-canonical Nucleic Acids: CERIC post-doc won best poster award
|Recently, our post-doc researcher Giuseppe Satta won the best poster award at the Advances in Noncanonical Nucleic Acids (ANNA) 2025 conference. The event, which is held annually in Slovenia, this year took place in Bohinj (23-25 October).
The work presented in the winning poster (Targeting G-rich lncRNA and Its Structural Polymorphism with Selective G-Quadruplex Ligands: An NMR Study) focused on G-quadruplexes, non-canonical structures formed through guanine base pairs stabilized by a centrally located monovalent cation. In particular, the study represents the first systematic nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) screening of the interaction between small molecules and an RNA G-quadruplex structure.
The main goal was to identify ligands capable of selectively interacting with a G-quadruplex structure of a long non-coding RNA called REG1CP, involved in protein recruitment associated with colon tumour development. “To study this process, we used a combination of complementary analytical techniques, including NMR and Circular Dichroism (CD) spectroscopy to support the analysis of conformational stability – says Dr. Satta – Until now, ligand-binding studies have focused mostly on DNA G-Quadruplexes, so this project opens up a new and largely unexplored area, paving the way for selecting candidate ligands and studying their structural and functional effects in detail”.
Our warmest congratulations to Dr Satta and to the other authors of the research (whose results have already been submitted for publication in a scientific journal), Dr. Jasna Bric and Prof. Janez Plavec, which are both actively involved in state-of-the-art research on non-canonical nucleic acid structures at the Slovenian NMR Centre, where our Slovenian Partner Facility is located.