Celebrating 30 years at Johns Hopkins!
The Rao Lab opened its newly refurbished doors in Jan, 1993 in the historic Wood Basic Science building of the Physiology Department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. At the time, the internet was in its infancy and we sent messages by FAX. In our first few years at Hopkins, we used yeast as a model organism and discovered several new families of ion transporters, establishing multiple independent research directions de novo which we are still busy pursuing today!
Over the years, our experimental reach has become diverse and multidisciplinary, harnessing the range of available models: (i) bacterial orthologs for structural insights, (ii) yeast for data mining and functional screening of human variants, (iii) 3D organoids and polarized epithelia for cell biological and transport studies and (iv) mouse models and patient databases for pathophysiological insight. Currently, we apply these approaches broadly to understand the cellular and molecular basis of cancer, disorders of the skin, and neurological and metabolic disease.