A (Scientific) Lifetime Affair With Nucleic Acids

I am Distinguished Professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at University of California, Los Angeles, where I was hired in 1985 as the first female assistant professor in the department. I received my PhD from University of California, San Diego, under the guidance of Professor David Kearns, where I used NMR spectroscopy to study drug binding to random sequence DNA and published the first two-dimensional NMR spectra of short synthetic DNA duplexes. From 1982 to 1985 I was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Postdoctoral fellow in the Professor Alexander Rich laboratory, where I investigated structures of Z-DNA by NMR. At UCLA, my lab pioneered the application of macromolecular NMR spectroscopy to the study of DNA and RNA structure, folding, and interactions with cations, drugs, and proteins. We published the first NMR structures of DNA triplexes, quadruplexes, and aptamers, and our work has provided fundamental insights into DNA A-tract bending, cation interactions with DNA, Hoogsteen base pairs, and drug binding to DNA. My lab has made major contributions to understanding RNA folding, dynamics, and function, including pseudoknots, aptamers, ribozymes, and riboswitches, and recognition of RNA by proteins. Over the past 2 decades, the Feigon laboratory pioneered structure-function studies of telomerase, from solution NMR and X-ray crystal structures and dynamics studies of RNA and RNA-protein domains of human and Tetrahymena telomerase, to the first structure of a telomerase holoenzyme, by negative stain EM in 2013, and subsequent cryo-EM structures of telomerase and associated proteins. Recent work also includes structural biology of 7SK RNP.