I was born in Murten, a small but nice village close to Bern, where I did all my studies. I am in the Nowacki lab already since my bachelor studies and I did my Master and now my PhD in the lab. I guess I like it here 😉

During my Master, I was working on a protein called Pdsg2, which we could show is involved in the genome rearrangements of Paramecium. I started my PhD more than two years ago after I did a short internship in a biotech company between my Master and PhD studies.

I am currently working on the Dicer-like proteins from Paramecium, which are involved in the production of two classes of small RNAs.  I would like to better understand their mechanism of action and try to investigate their sequence preferences.

Additionally, I am also involved in supervising Bachelor and Master students during their practicals.

 

Hoehener, Cristina; Hug, Iris; Nowacki, Mariusz (2018). Dicer-like Enzymes with Sequence Cleavage Preferences. Cell, 173 (1) pp. 234-247.

Highlights:

• Dicer-like proteins can cleave dsRNA in a sequence-specific manner
• Dicer-like proteins produce small RNAs with 5′ and 3′ sequence bias
• Small RNA sequence bias enables precise targeting of transposon-derived IESs
• Dcl5 recognizes IES-IES junction sequence mot