![[Department of Plant Biology and Pathology]](http://njaes.rutgers.edu/_common/images/subheads/plantbiopath.gif "[Department of Plant Biology and Pathology]"){kind=small}
Contact Information
Mailing Address
Rutgers University
Department of Plant Biology & Pathology
Foran Hall/ Cook Campus
59 Dudley Rd.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
tumer@aesop.rutgers.edu
Campus Location
Office: Room 208A Foran Hall, 732-932-8165 ext. 215
Lab: Room 213 Foran Hall, 732-932-8165 ext. 217
Research Interests
Major focus of the research in our laboratory is studying the mechanism by which ribosome inactivating proteins (RIPs) inhibit cellular translation and viral infection. Pokeweed antiviral protein (PAP), a ribosome inactivating protein from Phytolacca americana inhibits translation by catalytically removing a specific adenine residue from the large rRNA of the 60S subunit of eukaryotic ribosomes. In addition to its ribosome inactivating ability, PAP has potent activity against many plant and animal viruses including HIV. PAP has been targeted to cancer cells as the cytotoxic moiety of immunotoxins and has shown significant clinical antileukemic activity. Our research involves understanding the mechanism of cytotoxicity and antiviral activity of PAP. We have demonstrated that expression of PAP in transgenic plants leads to broad spectrum virus resistance. We investigated the mechanism of cytotoxicity of PAP and demonstrated that cytotoxicity is not solely due to enzymatic activity, but appears to involve different domains of the protein. We expressed several non-toxic PAP mutants in transgenic plants and demonstrated that antiviral activity of PAP can be separated from its cytotoxicity. We recently showed that PAP inhibits frameshifting and retrotransposition of Ty1 in yeast and identified yeast chromosomal mutants that are resistant to PAP. Our current research focuses on characterizing these host genes and determining their role in ribosome depurination and virus resistance.
Publications
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Rutgers Affiliations
Dr. Nilgun Tumer joined the department in 1992 and was promoted to Professor in 2001.