Tag: MADISONFITZGERALD

Live Blogger: Madison Fitzgerald
Editors: Lirong Shi and Ryan Schildcrout

This piece was written live during the 8th annual RNA Symposium, “Unmasking the Power of RNA: From Structure to Medicine” hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for RNA Biomedicine. Follow MiSciWriters’ coverage of this event on Twitter with the hashtag #umichrna.

For millennia, humans have been collecting and compiling information. Literally – the first encyclopedia was published in the 1st Century by Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman. Our funny-named friend compiled 37 chapters worth of information on topics such as astronomy, botany, geology, pharmacology, zoology, and human physiology. In the modern era, scientists look to other encyclopedic sources to find information. We go to PubMed to read journal articles, to GenBank or BV-BRC to view sequenced genomes, and to Kegg Pathway to browse metabolic pathways found in our favorite species. We use these databases containing information from disparate sources to inform our research and facilitate scientific discovery. University of Connecticut Professor Dr. Brenton R. Graveley and his team take a different approach. Rather than compiling data from experiments performed using a variety of materials, methods, and data analysis pipelines, this consortium is generating data with standardized protocols. The end goal? A comprehensive encyclopedia of RNA elements (ENCORE). In his talk at the Center for RNA Biomedicine’s 2024 RNA Symposium, Dr. Graveley presented the progress towards this goal. But first, what are functional RNA elements?