Welcome to the Faller Lab website
Our lab is interested in RNA biology, and is focused on finding vulnerabilities in cancer cells that can be exploited with therapy.We are part of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.
FALLER LAB NEWS
OCTOBER 2023
NEW LAB PREPRINT!
Anna Dopler just published a pre-print of her PhD work, looking at the role that ribosomes play in cytokine responses. Awesome stuff. It can be found here.
AUGUST 2023
PAPER ALERT!
Congrats to Claudette Spaan on her paper! We helped out a little, and are glad to see the paper out. It can be found here.
MARCH 2023
Welcome to Edwin Kyei-Baffour, who has joined the lab as a PhD student!
JANUARY 2023
PAPER ALERT!
Happy to help out Jas and Marco on this paper, studying how moles can be eliminated by targeting anti-apoptotic pathways. It is available at Nature Communications, and you can read it here.
DECEMBER 2022
PAPER ALERT!
I had a good time writing this review of recent advances in our understanding of RNA translation and the proteome. It was just published in Mol Cell, and you can find it here.
OCTOBER 2022
PAPER ALERT!
Yuval Malka and Ferhat Alkan just published a paper that could potentially redefine what we mean by the “transcriptome”. They show that mRNAs get cleaved into uncapped fragments, that are capable of producing proteins! You can find it here. Nature also released a commentary about it, which shows how important a paper it is.
SEPTEMBER 2022
PAPER ALERT!
Thom Molenaar in the Van Leeuwen Lab just published this paper, studying the role of a histone methylase on cell size. We were happy to help with the little that we did!
AUGUST 2022
Welcome Yuval Malka to the lab! Yuval will be working on RNA processing, and the changes that directed processing can cause.
AUGUST 2022
PAPER ALERT!
Another paper out, which can be found here. In it Joana Silva shows that, bizarrely, the intestinal stem cell detects amino acid availability via the ribosome, rather than the standard nutrient sensing pathways, and that the ribosome drives a drastic change in stem cell identity under those conditions. Beautiful paper, fascinating story!
JULY 2022
Welcome to the lab Anna Dopler! Anna will be working on the role that ribosomes play in the ability of cancer cells to aviod detection by our immune system!
JUNE 2022
PAPER ALERT!
Very happy to see this paper out! In it we show that you can detect ribosome heterogeneity using Ribo Seq. Huge congrats to lead author Ferhat Alkan, and to everyone else in the lab! Paper can be found here.
MAY 2022
JOIN US!
We are looking for a PhD student to join the lab. If you have a background in computational biology, get in touch! Details can be found here and applications can be made through the NKI website.
FEBRUARY 2022
FUNDING GRANTED!
Very happy that the NWO have awarded us funding to study ribosome heterogeneity in the context of antigen presentation!
DECEMBER 2021
FUNDING GRANTED!
Delighted to say that the KWF have granted us funding for 3 years to study ribosomes in bowel cancer. Lovely news to get before the holiday!
DECEMBER 2021
PAPER ALERT!
Congrats to John Knight in the Sansom lab on his paper titled “Rpl24Bst mutation suppresses colorectal cancer by promoting eEF2 phosphorylation via eEF2K”. Happy to see it out, and you can find the paper here!
OCTOBER 2021
FUNDING GRANTED!
A huge thanks to the Mark Foundation, who have funded a joint project between our lab and Pia Kvistborg’s lab! We will be looking at how ribosomes can change the antigen repertoire, and how this is hijacked by cancer to evade the immune system!
SEPTEMBER 2021
Joana Silva will be presenting results from her project at the Protein Synthesis and Translational Control meeting this month! Her talk is titled “RNA translation regulates intestinal stem cell identity
via Zaka activation”, and it’s super interesting, I promise!
SEPTEMBER 2021
PAPER ALERT!
Congrats to Julien Champagne (I’ll resist the obvious joke!). His paper “Oncogene-dependent sloppiness in mRNA translation” was published in Molecular Cell, and can be found here.
JULY 2021
PAPER ALERT!
Happy to be part of this study published in Nature Communications this month: “Glucocorticoid receptor triggers a reversible drug-tolerant dormancy state with acquired therapeutic vulnerabilities in lung cancer”. Read it here.
JUNE 2021
PAPER ALERT!
It was good fun helping Tania Martins Garcia out with this one. Read about how “Early Life Antibiotics Influence In Vivo and In Vitro Mouse Intestinal Epithelium Maturation and Functioning” in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Find it here.
JUNE 2021
I will be presenting some of the lab’s work at the RNA Society meeting this month. It’s a project spearheaded by Joana Silva, and the talk will be about what happens when ribosomes collide.
JUNE 2021
PAPER ALERT!
Congrats to Josh Leach on the publication of his paper in Nature Communications. We were happy to help out! It’s called “Oncogenic BRAF, unrestrained by TGFβ-receptor signalling, drives right-sided colonic tumorigenesis”, and you can find it here.
MAY 2021
Welcome to Louise van Bergen, who has joined our lab for her Masters internship!
MAY 2021
PAPER ALERT!
We helped out John with this paper, published in Cancer Discovery this month! The paper is called “MNK Inhibition Sensitizes KRAS-Mutant Colorectal Cancer to mTORC1 Inhibition by Reducing eIF4E Phosphorylation and c-MYC Expression”, and can be read here.
MARCH 2021
PAPER ALERT!
Ferhat Alkan’s first paper has dropped in the journal Bioinformatics! Well done him! It’s called “Ribo-ODDR: Oligo design pipeline for experiment-specific rRNA depletion in ribo-seq”, and can be found here.
DECEMBER 2020
PAPER ALERT!
Emma Minnee’s review entitled “Translation initiation and its relevance in colorectal cancer” has been published in FEBS journal. You can read it here.
