Academic focus: Regulation and function of transposable elements, small RNA biology, chromatin biology
Research summary: My research focuses on how transposons – genetic elements that are able to jump around and propagate in our genome and comprise half of the human DNA – are kept in check and how they interact with the host to provide beneficial functions. In almost all animals, a dedicated small RNA pathway, the piRNA pathway, acts in the germline to repress the expression of transposons. In fruit flies, our main model organism, piRNAs act both in the cell nucleus to repress transcription and in the cytoplasm to destroy transposons, and we are focusing on dissecting the molecular details of these processes. We are also exploring how transposons, and their regulation by small RNAs, have been co-opted into gene regulatory networks to modulate developmental fate decisions using chicken and zebrafish models. Finally, more recently we are developing computational tools to explore the diversity of transposon expression profiles and their potential tissue- and sex-based expression patterns and the co-evolution of the transposons and their regulation in diverse organisms, from arthropods to humans.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I love being active and outdoors. I love hiking, backpacking, biking, skiing, ski touring, jogging, kayaking, and I very much look forward to starting to row again. I especially enjoy when I get to do these activities with my family, including our puppy. I love cooking, baking and gardening. I love to entertain and have friends over. Before work and kids took over my life completely, I enjoyed reading and all sorts of arts and crafts activities, especially pottery.
What brought you to Cornell CALS?
I think the single most attractive aspect was the amazing community in Molecular Biology and Genetics and affiliated departments that was immediately apparent during my interview visit. The atmosphere seems truly collegial and interactive, and there is a very clear shared appreciation for transposons like I have never seen before.
What do you think is important for people to understand about your field?
The transposon field has been underappreciated for decades and is now having a revolution. For a very long time, TEs have been viewed as deleterious or just genomic junk. Most genomic tools in fact filter out repetitive elements to focus on host coding genes. However, over the past roughly decade, appreciation for their importance as gene regulators, source of evolutionary innovation and even tools has exploded. I believe that we are still in the early stages of TE biology, and there are a lot of things to discover and a lot of tools to be developed. Importantly, TEs, the ways they integrate into host systems and the regulatory mechanisms that keep them in check are so diverse that the field needs expertise from a myriad of disciplines, from molecular and developmental biology and genetics to evolutionary biology, genomics, computational modeling and hard-core biochemistry and biophysics. As such, it provides a constant opportunity to interact with and learn from different disciplines.
Why did you feel inspired to pursue a career in this field?
My parents spent a year as visiting professors at Cornell, so I spent ninth grade at Ithaca High School. I took honors biology and was fascinated by the techniques and mechanistic discoveries of molecular biology we learned about. That is when I decided to become a molecular biologist. During my university years I worked in multiple labs, and my motivation to work strongly depended on the topic and approaches. I have always felt a strong desire to understand how things work, and when I finally landed in a lab studying chromatin biology and gene regulation, I often had to be forced to go home. That’s when I knew I was in the right field.
What advice do you have for students interested in your field of study?
Follow your passion! Graduate school is hard and draining with long times of feeling lost and things not making sense. Things will eventually fall into place, but it takes a lot of determination and patience to get there, which is much easier to keep up if you are passionate about the project. Make the project your own! Don’t just follow instructions from your principal investigator; try to come up with your own questions and solve the puzzle yourself. Make sure that you get a good balance between wet lab experience and computational work. Try to broaden your field of expertise and be daring and brave. Your training is the time where you have the time and most support to explore. Being able to do both will allow you to be more productive and ask and pursue questions in the field differently.
Learn more about Katalin from her CALS profile.
