Dr. Audrone Lapinaite is an assistant professor at the Center for Translational Vision Research and the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms of natural and synthetic DNA and RNA modifying enzymes, and advancing precision genome editing tools to treat genetic ocular diseases.
She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in biochemistry at Vilnius University (Lithuania), where she was working with Prof. Saulius Klimasauskas and Dr. Grazvydas Lukinavicius on the engineering of bacterial DNA methyltransferase to site-specifically tag genomic DNA.
Dr. Lapinaite received her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg (Germany), where she was working with Prof. Teresa Carlomagno on the structural and biochemical characterization of the box C/D RNA-protein complex (ribosomal RNA methyltransferase) using a combination of high-resolution (solution state NMR) and low-resolution (small angle neutron/X-ray scattering) approaches.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in the labs of Jennifer Doudna and Jamie Cate, she conducted research on the biochemical and structural characterization (using cryo-EM) of CRISPR-associated programmable RNA and DNA modifying enzymes.
Before joining UC Irvine, Dr. Lapinaite established her research group at Arizona State University in 2020. Her contributions to science have been recognized with a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) postdoctoral fellowship in 2015 and an NIH New Innovator Award in 2022.