We continue to develop and use tailored RNA-based technologies that have been successfully applied by others and are instrumental to our work (also see Resources). This includes an RNA aptamer-based affinity purification system (4xS1m) to understand RNA-protein interactions (Leppek, Stoecklin, 2014; Leppek et al., 2013) and our more recent VELCRO-IP (variable expansion segment-ligand chimeric ribosome-IP), a ribosome purification and mRNA-interaction strategy that harnesses the interspecies evolutionary change in rRNA ES sequence to engineer chimeric ribosomes. This allows us to comprehensively define classes of mRNAs that bind to a species-specific rRNA region on the ribosome (Leppek, Byeon, 2021).
We have recently assembled a versatile toolbox for characterizing internal ribosomal entry sites (IRESes) that included optimization of circular RNAs (circRNAs) for the functional investigation of IRESes (Koch, Zhang, Genuth et al., 2025). We strive to design and employ ribosome- and RNA-focused technologies to ask difficult biological questions.
A central question is: Which RNA-based strategies are required to address specific biological questions?
