Ming Tatt Cheah (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: x_; pinyin: Xi Mn - ) is a biologist specializing in immunology and genetics.

Born and raised in M alaysia, Cheah attended Chung Ling High School and later moved to the US, where he attended Yale University and became one of the few students in the school's 3 08-year history to graduate with an M.S./B.S. diploma in four years. Cheah was a lso a recipient of Howard Hughes Medical Institute's prestigious Future Scientis ts Fellowship for his work on RNA splicing, and his contributing research was pu blished in the May 2007 issue of Nature.[1] Ming T. Cheah currently resides in Palo Alto, CA as an immunobiologist at the In stitute of Stem Cell Biology in the Stanford School of Medicine. Control of alternative RNA splicing and gene expression by eukaryotic riboswitch es Ming T. Cheah1,4, Andreas Wachter1,4, Narasimhan Sudarsan1 & Ronald R. Breaker1, 2,3 Department of Department of Howard Hughes 20, USA These authors Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology; Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; Medical Institute, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 065 contributed equally to this work.

Bacteria make extensive use of riboswitches1, 2 to sense metabolites and control gene expression, and typically do so by modulating premature transcription term ination or translation initiation. The most widespread riboswitch class known in bacteria responds to the coenzyme thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP)3, 4, which is a derivative of vitamin B1. Representatives of this class have also been identifie d5, 6 in fungi and plants, where they are predicted5, 7 to control messenger RNA splicing or processing. We examined three TPP riboswitches in the filamentous f ungus Neurospora crassa, and found that one activates and two repress gene expre ssion by controlling mRNA splicing. A detailed mechanism involving riboswitch-me diated base-pairing changes and alternative splicing control was elucidated for precursor NMT1 mRNAs, which code for a protein involved in TPP metabolism. These results demonstrate that eukaryotic cells employ metabolite-binding RNAs to reg ulate RNA splicing events that are important for the control of key biochemical processes.