Live Blogger: Lauren Heinzinger
Editors: Ryan Schildcrout, Brenna Saladin
This piece was written live during the 10th annual RNA Symposium, “RNA Frontiers: From Mechanisms to Medicine” hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for RNA Biomedicine.
The flow of genetic information is a fundamental concept in biology, and it’s one of the first major topics that most biologists learn in school. DNA is first transcribed into RNA and then RNA is translated into protein. However, the process is far more complicated than this simple framework suggests. Dr. Karla Neugebauer begins her talk by diving into the hidden complexities of this process. She asks us to recall that the average human gene contains 30,000 base pairs and each gene typically takes 30 minutes to transcribe. As RNA transcripts become longer, more RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) can bind and other activities (e.g., RNA editing, RNA splicing) can occur. This means there is roughly a 30-minute window of opportunity to influence nascent RNA, or the newly synthesized immature RNA transcripts, making them dynamic moving targets for regulation. This is an important step in translation, as RNA processing can have far-reaching biological consequences.
Continue reading “Dr. Karla Neugebauer: Co-transcriptional RNA processing yields unexpected versatility in gene regulation”
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