Dr Susan Duncan
Postdoctoral Scientist
Susan works in Dr Yiliang Ding’s group where she uses microscopy to investigate the impact of RNA structure on gene regulation.
During her PhD in Professor Dame Caroline Dean’s group, Susan worked with Dr Stefanie Rosa to develop the first method to enable imaging and quantitative analysis of single RNA molecules in Arabidopsis root cells (single molecule RNA FISH – smFISH). After completing her PhD, Susan worked as a postdoctoral scientist for Dr Veronica Grieneisen where she imaged RNA to test mathematical model predictions. After optimising wheat RNA imaging during a post-doc in Professor Anthony Hall’s lab at the Earlham Institute, Susan visited Professor Philip Benfey’s lab at Duke University to investigate RNA subcellular localization during root development.
Since returning to the John Innes Centre in 2020, Susan has worked as part of Dr Yiliang Ding’s Group where she primarily uses imaging approaches to assess impacts of RNA structure on gene transcription, translation, and transcript degradation.
Selected Publications
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Duncan S, Johansson HE, Ding (2022)Reference genes for quantitative Arabidopsis single molecule RNA fluorescence in situ hybridizationJournal of Experimental BotanyPublisher's version: erac521
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Yang X, Yu H, Duncan S, Zhang Y, Cheema J, Liu H, Benjamin Miller, Zhang J, Kwok CK, Zhang H, Ding (2022)RNA G-quadruplex structure contributes to cold adaptation in plants.Nature communicationsPublisher's version: 2041-1723
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Zhang Y., Yang M., Duncan S., Yang X., Abdelhamid M. A. S., Huang L., Zhang H., Benfey P. N., Waller Z. A. E., Ding Y. (2019)G-quadruplex structures trigger RNA phase separation.Nucleic acids researchPublisher's version: 0305-1048