Biography

Jeff is the Executive Director of NYSBC and directly supervises a research team focused on understanding RNA’s ability to form complex, often conformationally dynamic 3-D structures, and how these structures drive biological function. A primary focus has been studying RNAs of viral origin that interact with and manipulate the cellular machinery in unexpected ways. While at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and now at NYSBC, he has made seminal contributions to our understanding of RNAs such as internal ribosome entry sites, exonuclease-resistant RNAs, reinitiation signals, and viral tRNA mimics. His group uses a variety of methods, including structural biology, biochemistry, virology, and bioinformatics to link structure to function to biology. In addition, his research group actively seeks to develop new methods to study RNA structure, most recently using cryoEM.

Publications

Enterovirus RNase L inhibiting RNAs are highly conserved with limited phylogenetic distribution

Samantha Zangari, Madeline Sherlock, Jeffrey Kieft

RNA

2026 September

A structural bridge between dengue virus tandem xrRNAs facilitates coordination of exonuclease resistance

Elizabeth Spear, Zoe O'Donoghue, Steve L. Bonilla, Kevin P. Larsen, Madeline E. Sherlock, Jeffrey S. Kieft

mBio, Vol. 17, Issue 9

2026 September

A bicistronic viral genome uses a compact type IV IRES near its 3' end to express a transmembrane protein

Sherlock, M.E., Segar, K.E., Kieft, J.S.

Cell Rep

2026 January

Distribution and structural diversity of Type IV internal ribosome entry sites

Segar, K.E., Sherlock, M.E., Kieft, J.S.

RNA

2026 January

Regional and National Shared Research Resources: Challenges and Opportunities

Jeffrey Kieft, David S. Butcher, Alexei S. Soares, Wuxian Shi, Edwin O. Lazo, Vivian Stojanoff, Venkateswaran Shekar, Thayumanasamy Somasundaram

Journal of Biomolecular Techniques, Vol. 36, Issue 4

2025 December

Focal Adhesion Kinase promotes ribosome biogenesis to drive advanced thyroid cancer cell growth and survival

Kellett, M., Sharma, V., Sherlock, M.E., Pugazhenthi, U., Rose, M., Joshi, M.U., Dzieciatkowska, M., Nguyen, V., Reigan, P., Hansen, K., Kieft, J.S., Schweppe, R.E.

Front Oncol

2025 January

Guidelines for minimal reporting requirements, design and interpretation of experiments involving the use of eukaryotic dual gene expression reporters

Loughran, G., others

Nat Struct Mol Biol

2025 January

A conserved class of viral RNA structures regulates translation reinitiation through dynamic ribosome interactions

Sherlock, M.E., Langeberg, C.J., Segar, K.E., Kieft, J.S.

Cell Rep

2025 January

Translon: a single term for translated regions

Michał I. Świrski, Jack A. S. Tierney, M. Mar Albà, Dmitry E. Andreev, Julie L. Aspden, John F. Atkins, Michal Bassani-Sternberg, Marla J. Berry, Stefano Biffo, Kathleen Boris-Lawrie, Mark Borodovsky, Ian Brierley, Matthew Brook, Marie A. Brunet, Janusz M. Bujnicki, Neva Caliskan, Lorenzo Calviello, Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis, Jamie H. D. Cate, Can Cenik, Kung Yao Chang, Yiwen Chen, Sonia Chothani, Jyoti S. Choudhary, Patricia L. Clark, Jim Clauwaert, Lynn Cooley, Erik Dassi, Kellie Dean, Jean-Jacques Diaz, Christoph Dieterich, Rivka Dikstein, Jonathan D. Dinman, Sergey E. Dmitriev, Olga A. Dontsova, Christine M. Dunham, Sandeep M. Eswarappa, Philip J. Farabaugh, Pouya Faridi, Ivo Fierro-Monti, Andrew E. Firth, David Gatfield, Fátima Gebauer, Mikhail S. Gelfand, Nicola K. Gray, Rachel Green, Chris H. Hill, Ya-Ming Hou, Norbert Hübner, Zoya Ignatova, Pavel Ivanov, Shintaro Iwasaki, Rory Johnson, Ahmad Jomaa, Marko Jovanovic, Irwin Jungreis, Manolis Kellis, Jeffrey S. Kieft, Alex V. Kochetov, Eugene V. Koonin, Andrei A. Korostelev, Joanna Kufel, Ivan V. Kulakovskiy, Leo Kurian, Denis L. J. Lafontaine, Ola Larsson, Gary Loughran, Julius Lukeš, Marco Mariotti, Elena S. Martens-Uzunova, Thomas F. Martinez, Akinobu Matsumoto, Joel McManus, Jan Medenbach, Sergey V. Melnikov, Gerben Menschaert, Catharina Merchante, Martin Mikl, W. Allen Miller, Oliver Mühlemann, Olivier Namy, Danny D. Nedialkova, Jozef Nosek, Sandra Orchard, Petar Ozretić, Mihaela Pertea, Dmitri D. Pervouchine, Luísa Romão, David Ron, Xavier Roucou, Maria P. Rubtsova, Jorge Ruiz-Orera, Alan Saghatelian, Steven L. Salzberg, Lucia A. Seale, Cathal Seoighe, Petr V. Sergiev, Premal Shah, Nikolay Shirokikh, Sarah A. Slavoff, Nahum Sonenberg, Timothy J. Stasevich, Roman J. Szczesny, Tiina Tamm, Marek Tchórzewski, Ivan Topisirovic, Michel L. Tremblay, Tamir Tuller, Igor Ulitsky, Leoš Shivaya Valášek, Petra Van Damme, Gabriella Viero, Juan Antonio Vizcaino, Christine Vogel, Edward W. J. Wallace, Jonathan S. Weissman, Eric Westhof, Nicola Whiffin, Daniel N. Wilson, Zhi Xie, Jonathan W. Yewdell, Martina M. Yordanova, Chien-Hung Yu, Vyacheslav Yurchenko, Bojan Zagrovic, TRANSLACORE, Maria Inês Almeida, Nese Atabey, Nikolaos Balatsos, Pavel Baranov, Anca Simona Bojan, Theodora Choli-Papadopoulou, Pierre Close, Victoria Cowling, Erik Dassi, Alexandre David, Kellie Dean, Jean-Jacques Diaz, Aleksandar Eftimov, Fátima Gebauer, Mark Helm, Cristina-Adela Iuga, Dana Jurkovičová, Arvydas Kanopka, Denis Lafontaine, Elena Martens-Uzunova, Lucia Messingerová, Henrik Nielsen, Petar Ozretić, Mehmet Ozturk, Vicent Pelechano, Marianna Penzo, Paulina Podszywalow-Bartnicka, Lejla Pojskić, John Le Quesne, Luísa Romão, Barak Rotblat, Ariel Stanhill, Georg Stoecklin, Tiina Tamm, Marek Tchorzewski, Vladimir Trajković, Leos Shivaya Valasek, Eivind Valen, Sinisa Volarevic, Ljubica Vucicevic, Kathleen Watt, Anne Willis, Masa Zdralevic, Taja Železnik Ramuta, Eivind Valen, Pavel V. Baranov

Nature Methods, Vol. 22, Issue 10, Pages 2002-2006

2025 January

RNA-Puzzles Round V: blind predictions of 23 RNA structures

Fan Bu, Yagoub Adam, Ryszard W. Adamiak, Maciej Antczak, Belisa Rebeca H. de Aquino, Nagendar Goud Badepally, Robert T. Batey, Eugene F. Baulin, Pawel Boinski, Michal J. Boniecki, Janusz M. Bujnicki, Kristy A. Carpenter, Jose Chacon, Shi-Jie Chen, Wah Chiu, Pablo Cordero, Naba Krishna Das, Rhiju Das, Wayne K. Dawson, Frank DiMaio, Feng Ding, Anne-Catherine Dock-Bregeon, Nikolay V. Dokholyan, Ron O. Dror, Stanisław Dunin-Horkawicz, Stephan Eismann, Eric Ennifar, Reza Esmaeeli, Masoud Amiri Farsani, Adrian R. Ferré-D’Amaré, Caleb Geniesse, George E. Ghanim, Horacio V. Guzman, Iris V. Hood, Lin Huang, Dharm Skandh Jain, Farhang Jaryani, Lei Jin, Astha Joshi, Masha Karelina, Jeffrey S. Kieft, Wipapat Kladwang, Sebastian Kmiecik, Deepak Koirala, Markus Kollmann, Rachael C. Kretsch, Mateusz Kurciński, Jun Li, Shuang Li, Marcin Magnus, BenoÎt Masquida, S. Naeim Moafinejad, Arup Mondal, Sunandan Mukherjee, Thi Hoang Duong Nguyen, Grigory Nikolaev, Chandran Nithin, Grace Nye, Iswarya P. N. Pandaranadar Jeyeram, Alberto Perez, Phillip Pham, Joseph A. Piccirilli, Smita Priyadarshini Pilla, Radosław Pluta, Simón Poblete, Almudena Ponce-Salvatierra, Mariusz Popenda, Lukasz Popenda, Fabrizio Pucci, Ramya Rangan, Angana Ray, Aiming Ren, Joanna Sarzynska, Congzhou Mike Sha, Filip Stefaniak, Zhaoming Su, Krishna C. Suddala, Marta Szachniuk, Raphael Townshend, Robert J. Trachman, Jian Wang, Wenkai Wang, Andrew Watkins, Tomasz K. Wirecki, Yi Xiao, Peng Xiong, Yiduo Xiong, Jianyi Yang, Joseph David Yesselman, Jinwei Zhang, Yi Zhang, Zhenzhen Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhou, Tomasz Zok, Dong Zhang, Sicheng Zhang, Adriana Żyła, Eric Westhof, Zhichao Miao

Nat Methods, Vol. 22, Issue 2, Pages 399-411

2025 January

Tick-borne flavivirus exoribonuclease-resistant RNAs contain a ‘double loop’ structure

Conner J. Langeberg, Matthew J. Szucs, Madeline E. Sherlock, Quentin Vicens, Jeffrey S. Kieft

2024 April

Diversity and modularity of tyrosine-accepting tRNA-like structures

Madeline E. Sherlock, Conner J. Langeberg, Jeffrey S. Kieft

RNA, Vol. 30, Issue 3, Pages 213-222

2024 March

The Giardia lamblia ribosome structure reveals divergences in several biological pathways and the mode of emetine function

Eiler, D.R., Wimberly, B.T., Bilodeau, D.Y., Rissland, O.R., Kieft, J.S.

Structure

2024 January

A generalizable scaffold-based approach for structure determination of RNAs by cryo-EM

Conner J Langeberg, Jeffrey S Kieft

Nucleic Acids Research, Vol. 51, Issue 20, Pages e100-e100

2023 November

An Evolutionarily Conserved Strategy for Ribosome Binding and Host Translation Inhibition by β-coronavirus Non-structural Protein 1

Stephanie F. Maurina, John P. O'Sullivan, Geetika Sharma, Daniel C. Pineda Rodriguez, Andrea MacFadden, Francesca Cendali, Morkos A. Henen, Beat Vögeli, Jeffrey S. Kieft, Anum Glasgow, Anna-Lena Steckelberg

Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 435, Issue 20, Pages 168259

2023 October

Principles, mechanisms, and biological implications of translation termination–reinitiation

Madeline E. Sherlock, Laura Baquero Galvis, Quentin Vicens, Jeffrey S. Kieft, Sujatha Jagannathan

RNA, Vol. 29, Issue 7, Pages 865-884

2023 July

Zika virus dumbbell-1 structure is critical for sfRNA presence and cytopathic effect during infection

Graham, M.E., Merrick, C., Akiyama, B.M., Szucs, M.J., Leach, S., Kieft, J.S., Beckham, J.D.

mBio

2023 January

Adoption of A-Z junctions in RNAs by binding of Za domains

Nichols, P.J., Bevers, S., Henen, M.A., Kieft, J.S., Vicens, Q., Vogeli, B.

Methods Mol Biol

2023 January