Sujatha Jagannathan receives FSH Society fellowship
Jul 18, 2014

Sujatha Jagannathan received a postdoctoral fellowship from the FSH Society. Suja proposed that RNA quality control pathways may be less efficient in muscle cells of patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD). FSHD is caused by inappropriate expression of the disease gene DUX4 in skeletal muscle of affected individuals, but the origins of DUX4’s toxicity are not known. In the model that Suja proposed, reduced RNA surveillance efficiency permits normally degraded aberrant RNAs to become stably expressed in DUX4-expressing cells, thereby contributing to multiple aspects of the disease.