Project P07

About

Pre-mRNA splicing is a highly dynamic and complex process. Great progress has recently been made in solving structures of the major assembly and functional states of the spliceosome by cryo-EM. However, there are still many limitations and open questions. The dynamic range of the spliceosome is extremely large and therefore we will study more intermediate structural states of the splicing process. Additionally, large parts of the spliceosome are not resolved due to their high mobility. Finally, the resolution needs to be improved to better understand the mechanistic and regulatory aspects of splicing. We will use small molecule splicing inhibitors to visualize more details of the conformational landscape of the spliceosome and employ our recently installed and updated unique cryo-EM that is especially suited to significantly improve the resolution of spliceosome structures.