Dr. Sergej Djuranovic

Assistant Professor, Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, Washington University School of Medicine

Dr. Sergej Djuranovic received his B.Sc and M.Sc from University of Belgrade, Serbia. He received his PhD from Eberhard Karls University and Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. There he worked under the supervision of Dr. Andrei Lupas investigating the evolution of protein structure and function from ancestral set of peptides which possibly emerged as RNA cofactors in the primordial ‘RNA world’. He also studied the structure and mechanism of action of AAA ATPases, focusing on the regulation of protein degradation by proteasomes and associated ATPases. He went to determine the structure and organization of AAA-ATPases that form the 19S subunit in proteasomes. In 2007, he moved to Rachel Green’s laboratory for his postdoctoral studies to study the mechanisms by which microRNAs control gene expression at the level of translation. He first proposed and then described a novel kinetic model that explains sequences of events that define the mechanism of miRNA-mediated translational repression. In 2013 he joined faculty at Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University, School of Medicine in St. Louis. His research group is interested in understanding molecular connection and mechanics of targeted mRNA regulation both by microRNA pathway components and other post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms dependent on mRNA sequence features and RNA binding proteins.TBD