Immune System Biology

Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and colleagues from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have discovered a new underlying cause of Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, a rare genetic disease that leads to bleeding and immune deficiencies in babies. Their findings involve the way cells cut and paste strands of RNA in a process called RNA splicing. The genetic mutations associated with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, they found, disrupt this process, ultimately preventing numerous immune and anti-inflammatory proteins from being made correctly.