Mitch Guttman's previous work explored unknown regions of the genome, identifying genes that do not produce proteins but do function in other important ways. His research has defined a new class of players in the genome and shed light on how they work.
Guttman described a new class of genes called lincRNAs, short for large intergenic noncoding RNA. These genes perform many jobs in the cell, among them regulating the plasticity of embryonic stem cells, controlling how they become any other kind of cell.
His work elucidated a potential role for lincRNAs as key organizers of protein complexes.