Dear Colleagues,

RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play essential roles in human biology and pathogenesis. RBPs are essential tuners of posttranscriptional gene regulation, playing a pleiotropic role in RNA biology, processing, and metabolism from alternative splicing, polyadenylation, mRNA stability, transport, and mRNA localization, to translational control and regulation of coding and non-coding transcripts, like miRNAs, circular and long-non coding RNA. 

Recent studies opened a renewed view about our understanding of RBP networks associated with molecular and cell biology, genetics, diseases associated with phenotype, and translational biomedicine. RBPs have been associated with several diseases, including neurological diseases, cancer, immunity response, and infective pathology. Significant progress has been made in our understanding of RBPs through integrative approaches and methods, and many exploratory routes are driving unexpected novel developments from basic mechanisms to discovering potential biomarkers to therapeutic strategies. 

The aim of this special issue is to explore all aspects of RBPs research-oriented in human diseases, from molecular mechanisms to regulatory roles, from effects in mRNA binding and translational control to identification and measurement of RNA-protein interactions, discovering of novel RBP family, associated to neurodegenerative diseases, aging, senescence, psychiatric diseases, apoptosis, angiogenesis, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, infectious disease, as Covid-19, but also autoimmunity and muscular disorders.

We invite authors to submit their original research as well as review articles describing emerging molecular aspects of RBP biology and translational medicine findings and future therapeutic applications, mapping the geography of RNA-Binding Proteins in human health and diseases.

Dr. Christian Barbato 

Guest Editor