Joshua Heyza
@heyzajr.bsky.social
Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine. Lab website: www.jheyzalab.com
A cool collaboration with Houra Merrikh led by Oyku Sensoy. Oyku identified a moonlighting function of asparaginyl tRNA synthetase in preventing replication-restart from RNA:DNA hybrids in B. subtilis.
bioRxiv Genetics@biorxiv-genetic.bsky.social · 5mo agoA universal regulatory mechanism for prevention of replication restart from RNA:DNA hybrids https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.26.708313v1
New Print Alert! A fun collab with Kathy Meek at MSU. Led by talented bioinformatician Giovanni Pascarella we demonstrate that Ku70/80 binds intronic antisense Alu elements to inhibit cryptic splice sites. For details see the thread below! 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Ku limits aberrant mRNA splicing promoted by intronic antisense Alu elements
Alu elements are short repeats that occupy approximately 10% of the human genome. Saturation of primate genomes with Alu sequences occurred at the prosimian/new-world monkey evolutionary juncture. Alu...
biorxiv.org
Super excited to share our most recent pre-print, lead by K99 fellow @heyzajr.bsky.social, who will be starting his own lab at Wayne State University in February! The question is how are DNA breaks held together during HR?? 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The PST repeat region of MDC1 is a tunable multivalent chromatin tethering domain
DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are widely considered the most cytotoxic DNA lesions occurring in cells because they physically disrupt the connectivity of the DNA double helix. Homologous recombinati...
biorxiv.org
Here is a fun little teaser! What DNA repair factor does this to mitotic chromosomes? Pre-print should be up any time now! Exciting work by @heyzajr.bsky.social!