Gisela T. Storz

Dr. Gisela Storz is the Head of the Section on Environmental Gene Regulation and a Senior Investigator at National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Storz has made contributions in multiple fields of molecular biology, including groundbreaking experiments on the sensing of oxidative stress and the roles of regulatory RNAs and small proteins in bacteria. She showed that, upon oxidative stress, disulfide bond formation in the transcription regulator OxyR changed the protein from a repressor to an activator, a beautiful example of direct environmental modulation of regulator function. As a result of the serendipitous detection of the peroxide-induced OxyS RNA, one of the first small, regulatory RNAs to be discovered, work in her lab shifted to the genome-wide identification and study of small RNAs. Characterization of these small RNAs revealed that the RNA chaperone Hfq stimulates the pairing of the majority of the small RNAs with mRNA targets and that the small RNAs are integral to most regulatory circuits in bacteria. Recently, work in the Storz lab has extended to the detection and study of proteins of less than 50 amino acids, another class of molecules overlooked by traditional methods of investigation. Storz is the recipient of the Eli Lilly Award of the American Society of Microbiology, a fellow of the American Society of Microbiology, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her publications appear in journals such as BMC Biology, RNA, and Science.