Dr Alper Akay

Biography

I did my PhD in Scotland on RNA-binding proteins and non-coding RNAs before moving to the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge for my postdoctoral research. Here, I explored multiple RNA-mediated gene regulatory mechanisms, including small silencing RNAs, long non-coding RNAs and RNA modifications.

In 2020 I was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to start my research group at the University of East Anglia to study the function of RNA modifications and their regulation. I am particularly interested in how RNA regulates essential processes in the cell and how RNA functions as a signalling molecule during developmental processes. We are using diverse bacterial diets of C. elegans to understand how dietary metabolites affect gene expression and RNA modifications.