The Mühlemann lab investigates post-transcriptional gene regulation in mammalian cells.

One longstanding research focus on the lab is trying to decipher the molecular mechanism and the biological and medical implications of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). NMD is an important mRNA quality control process that recognizes and degrades mRNPs that fail to properly terminate translation. However, NMD also regulates expression levels of many physiological mRNAs.

Another research focus concerns the packaging of nascent pre-mRNAs with hnRNP proteins and other RNA-binding proteins. The pre-mRNP architecture determines mRNA maturation steps like splicing and nucleo-cytoplasmic export.