Vortrag
New Fragments of Old Molecules
Mittwoch 27.01.2016, 18:00 - 19:00
Veranstaltungsort:
LMU, Richard-Wagner-Str. 10, Raum D105
Vortragender
Professor Dr. Andrey Grigoriev
Colloquium Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
I present rather unusual suspects in the world of gene regulation – transfer RNA
fragments (tRFs). Such fragments have previously escaped detection or have been
generally ignored as noise due to low count numbers in of small RNA libraries. While
the focus in the analysis of such libraries has been primarily on microRNAs (miRNAs),
recent studies have reported findings of tRFs across a range of organisms. We had
previously described age-related dynamics of miRNA loading into different RNA-
induced silencing complexes (RISC) of Drosophila melanogaster using small RNA-
Seq data. Here I focus on tRFs found in the same transcriptome libraries, and their
structural and functional features that make these fragments surprisingly similar to
miRNAs. We found that Drosophila tRF reads mapped to tRNA genes for all 20 amino
acids and detected fragments of both nuclear and mitochondrial tRNAs. Following
the similarities with miRNAs and based on complementarity with conserved Drosophila
genome regions we described potential seed sequences found in the most abundant
tRFs. Further, we identified their possible targets with matches in the Drosophila
melanogaster 3'UTR regions. Strikingly, these potential target genes of the most
abundant tRFs show significant Gene Ontology enrichment in development and
neuronal function. This observation suggests that involvement of tRFs in the RNA
interfering pathway may play a role in brain activity or brain changes with age.
Veranstalter
TUM, LMU, Helmholtz-Zentrum München
Ansprechpartner
Prof. Dr. H.W. Mewes, TU München