David Z. Bushhouse

The paper designs and discovers a new modular transcriptional riboswitch architecture called 'tug-of-war' that suppresses intrinsic termination by ligand-stabilized RNA structures upstream of terminators.

The paper shows that slowing RNA folding kinetics enhances riboswitch sensitivity in vivo and identifies general principles for programming RNA folding dynamics.

The paper shows how mutations in a riboswitch can tune its dynamic range by altering strand displacement kinetics in E. coli.

The paper develops an in cellulo assay to study Pol III transcription termination in human cells and identifies sequence and structural determinants for efficient termination.