| Citation | Distinguished for his studies of transport between the nucleus and cytoplasm and of the post-transcriptional processing of RNA. He was the first to define signals that specified the import and export of ribonucleoprotein particles into and out of the cell nucleus. He was also the first to identify a protein involved in RNA export to the cytoplasm, namely the cap binding complex. He also showed that the cap binding complex is involved in pre-mRNA processing.
Iain Mattaj characterised the unique promoter elements of U snRNAs and the RNA binding domains of their protein partners. He showed that the snRNP protein U1A regulates polyadenylation of its own mRNA and reconstituted this remarkable autoregulatory mechanism from recombinant components. Recently he has discovered a novel receptor for the export of proteins and ribonucleoproteins from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. |