Chairat Tunghirun, Ph.D.

     Synthetic biology is a multidisciplinary field of science that involves constructing new biological systems and redesigning existing microorganisms for useful purposes. This field offers innovative approaches capable of delivering new solutions to many research challenges. We expect to perform specific research tasks and solve unique problems of our own choosing. By using bacteria and yeast as a starting organism model and harnessing their biological processes, my lab seeks to create a novel biological system capable of engineering and evolving individual protein and RNA, or both in the laboratory, as a tool for studying complex RNA-protein interactions and revealing new basic scientific insights into the biological processes. To place our work into context, we first designed and developed an in vivo screening system to identify the specific protein-RNA interaction in bacteria, a method used for uncovering the packaging signal (PS) RNA within severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genome. This PS RNA for the SARS-CoV-2 is still obscure and incompletely uncharacterized. The designed system underlines bacterial translation repression in which the protein of interest interacts with the defined RNA motif placed into reporter mRNAs, resulting in the repression of reporter gene expression. With exceptionally designed gene constructs in the system, we found a promising RNA motif which is an unknown core nucleation site for SARS-CoV-2 genome encapsidation. This RNA motif was strongly bound to the viral nucleocapsid (N) protein, a key component known to package the coronavirus genome. This running project was granted by the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT).

1.Tunghirun C, Narkthong V, Chaicumpa W, Chimnaronk S. Interference of dengue replication by blocking the access of 3′ SL RNA to the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Antiviral Res. 2020;182:104921.

2.Hodge K, Tunghirun C, Kamkaew M, Limjindaporn T, Yenchitsomanus PT, Chimnaronk S. Identification of a Conserved RNA-dependent RNA Polymerase (RdRp)-RNA Interface Required for Flaviviral Replication. J Biol Chem. 2016;291(33):17437-49.