Research Program: Immunology
Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology, Department of Medicine

Bohja001@umn.edu
612-625-7679 — office
612- 624-0469 — lab
Preferred contact method: e-mail

Dr. Bohjanen's clinical profile
(University of Minnesota Physicians Web site)

Dr. Bohjanen received his M.D., Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1993. He then pursued residency training in internal medicine and fellowship training in infectious diseases at Duke University. Dr. Bohjanen has been a member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota since 2000 and a member of the Masonic Cancer Center faculty since 2002.

Research Interests

Dr. Bohjanen's laboratory is interested in understanding the role of mRNA decay in regulating gene expression in normal and malignant T cells. They have recently used microarray technology to measure the mRNA decay rates of thousands of transcripts expressed in human T cells and have identified numerous transcripts that are abnormally stable and are overexpressed in malignant T cells. Many of these abnormally stable transcripts encode important regulators of cell growth, apoptosis, and stress response pathways. The overexpression of these transcripts through abnormal mRNA stabilization appears to contributes to the development of the malignant phenotype. Current work in Dr. Bohjanen's laboratory focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which mRNA decay is regulated in normal T cells and the aberrant molecular events that occur in malignancy.

Selected Publications

Raghavan A, Bohjanen PR. 2004. Microarray-based analyses of mRNA decay in the regulation of mammalian gene expression. Brief Funct Genomics Proteomic. 2004;3:112-124.

Raghavan A, Dhalla M, Bakheet T, Ogilvie RL, Vlasova IA, Khabar KSA, Williams BRG, Bohjanen PR. Patterns of coordinate down-regulation of ARE-containing transcripts following immune cell activation. Genomics 2004;84: 1002-1013.

Ogilvie RL, Abelson M, Hau HH, Vlasova I, Blackshear PJ, Bohjanen PR. Tristetraprolin down-regulates interleukin-2 gene expression through AU-rich element-mediated mRNA decay. J Immunol. 2005;174:953-961.

Vlasova I, McNabb J, Raghavan A, Williams D, Reilly C, Bohjanen KA, Bohjanen PR. Coordinate stabilization of growth-regulatory transcripts in T cell malignancies. Genomics 2005;86:159-171.

Reilly C, Raghavan A, Bohjanen P. Global assessment of cross-hybridization for oligonucleotide arrays. J Biomol Tech. 2006;17:163-172.

Hau HH, Walsh R, Ogilvie RL, Reilly CS, Bohjanen PR. Tristetraprolin recruits functional mRNA decay complexes to ARE sequences. J Cell Biochem. 2007;100:1477-92.

Vlasova IA, Tahoe NM, Fan D, Rattenbacher B, SternJohn JR, Larsson O, Vasdewani J, Karypis G, Reilly CS, Bitterman P, Bohjanen PR. Conserved GU-rich elements mediate mRNA decay by binding to CUG-binding protein 1. Mol Cell. 2008;29:263-270.