Monthly: January 2026

Ksenia’s PhD work has now been published in Nucleic Acids Research. Her paper shows that the Multiple Antibiotic Resistance Activator protein, a transcription factor also known as MarA, distorts DNA base pairing, at positions either side of its DNA target, upon binding the double helix. Ksenia discovered that this DNA distortion can activate transcription if it coincides with the position at which RNA polymerase initiates unwinding of promoters to begin transcription.