UC Riverside Lab Lands $2.1M NIH Grant to Decode Stress-Response Circuits

The five-year award from NIGMS will fund research on how cells regulate genes under stress.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of California, Riverside researcher Sonali Chaturvedi a five-year, $2.1 million grant to study how cells maintain stability while responding to environmental stress.

Chaturvedi’s lab plans to use the R35 Early Stage Investigator grant from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, announced July 21, to study transcriptional feedback circuits. The team will build simplified versions of these circuits and observe how they behave under different environmental conditions, including infection, low oxygen, heat, cold, nutrient deprivation, ultraviolet light damage, inflammation, and toxin exposure. By stripping the circuits down to their essential components, the researchers aim to identify general regulatory principles that hold across different cell types.

“Cells are constantly receiving signals from their environment, but they can’t overreact,” Chaturvedi said in a statement. “We’re trying to understand the basic rules that let cells remain stable while still adapting to stress. Those rules are fundamental to nearly every biological process.”

The lab will separately investigate whether cells pass along more than DNA when they divide. Chaturvedi’s team plans to test whether cells also inherit patterns of gene regulation that shape how daughter and granddaughter cells respond to future stress.

“This grant gives us the freedom to ask big questions,” Chaturvedi said. “If we can understand how cells maintain both stability and flexibility, we’ll have a much better understanding of how life works at its most fundamental level.”