Notice Board

The Alberta RNA Research and Training Institute presents Dr. Athanasios Zovoilis, candidate for Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in RNA Bioinformatics.

Dr. Athanasios Zovoilis
Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology
Harvard Medical School Cambridge, Massachusetts

“Lines, circles and transcriptional noise: Decoding the non-protein coding transcriptome and its role in human disease”

Thursday, Dec 10th 2015, 3:05PM-4:20PM

Location: C610 (University Hall)

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract:

The largest part of mammalian genomes does not encode for proteins. For a long time it has been accepted that this non-protein-coding genome primarily consisted of what was called ''junk'' DNA and had no obvious functional importance. With application of high-throughput RNA sequencing it became evident that the vast majority of "junk DNA" is in fact transcribed into RNA. It remains unknown whether most of these non-coding RNAs have a role in cell function and human disease. However, data analysis pipelines from large scale RNA sequencing projects in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease (AD) often ignore most of these RNAs or regard them as transcriptional noise. As a result, they filter out these RNAs from further analysis. This talk will present two examples from my previous and current work that together with others attempt to change the above approach to "transcriptional noise". I will elaborate on bioinformatics approaches I used to detect and study the function of two classes of non-coding RNAs that until recently we have either ignored or have been unable to detect. To this end, I will show that trying to decode "transcriptional noise" not only may help us to understand further the genomic etiology of diseases like cancer and AD but can also deliver surprising findings that can answer old questions in RNA biology.