RNA2024

March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2024

Dr. Leemor Joshua-Tor: Mad about U: Regulating Let7 Pre-miRNA

Live Blogger: Rachael Baliira
Editors: Madison Fitzgerald 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.

When you look back at your baby photo, first grade school picture with missing teeth, or even your prom photo, and compare them to your latest selfie, have you stopped to marvel at how you’ve developed into the person you are now? If you dive into the mechanisms that ensure normal development, cell differentiation and fate, you would be amazed at all that has to go right to make you ‘you.’ Your body achieves this through gene silencing, which is a negative feedback mechanism that regulates gene expression to define cell fate and timely gene expression. Micro-RNAs (miRNA) are the small agents that carry out gene silencing. They suppress unwanted expression of specific genes by binding to their mature transcripts, known as messenger RNA (mRNA), so that the cell only expresses proteins that are needed at the time. When this happens, the marked mRNA are destroyed instead of being translated into a protein. Thus, miRNA-dependent silencing of gene expression is essential for normal development and cell differentiation states. Over the years, scientists studying miRNA have uncovered much about miRNA-dependent gene silencing activity but there is still much to understand about how miRNAs come to be. Luckily, miRNA synthesis and regulation is a matter of great importance to the Joshua-Tor lab.

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March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2024

Dr. Brenton R. Graveley: A Comprehensive Binding and Functional Map of Human RNA-Binding Proteins

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

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?

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March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2024

Dr. Peter Todd: Short Tandem Repeats in Neuronal Function and Neurological Disease

Live Blogger: Ryan Schildcrout
Editor: Madison Fitzgerald

When we think of “DNA,” we normally think about genes that encode proteins. However, the vast majority of the human genome is thought to be “non-coding,” in that the DNA does not encode proteins. Non-coding DNA has been long thought of as biologically inert, but in the last few decades, scientists have started exploring its purpose. Since then, it has been recognized to be a key element in regulating gene expression. Within those non-coding regions exist millions of Short Tandem Repeats, or microsatellites, which are repetitive DNA sequences of up to 6 base pairs. The number of repeats within a microsatellite can vary drastically across the genome. We know very little about the function of these microsatellites because next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies are unable to sequence highly repetitive regions of DNA. Some of these repeats have been linked to neurological disorders such as Autism, ALS, and dementia, thus highlighting the need to study the mechanisms by which they cause disease. Dr. Peter Todd from the University of Michigan has recently uncovered some of these mechanisms in context with neurological diseases.

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March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2024

Dr. Victoria D’Souza: Structure-based redefinition of the HIV-1 reverse transcription initiation

Live Blogger: Brenna Saladin
Editors: Varsha Shankar and Ryan Schildcrout

Viruses are a routine occurrence in everyday life. The common cold, the flu, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic has kept viruses at the forefront of the public mind. One of the key aspects of the viral life cycle and infectious mechanism is the fact that they rely on the host in order to replicate and spread infection. Viruses do not contain their own machinery for replication, but rather they hijack host cell machinery to do their bidding. Our speaker today studies one of the beginning steps of this process: reverse transcription initiation. This is the process by which the retroviruses, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), create the DNA template from viral RNA that encodes the necessary components for infection and proliferation in host cells. The D’ Souza lab studies these processes so that we have a better understanding of the mechanisms of viral infection, and therefore the potential to create drugs to combat them.

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March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 misciwriterseditors blog, RNA2024

Dr. Drew Weissman: Nucleoside Modified mRNA-LNP Therapeutics

Live Blogger: Matthew Blacksmith
Editors: Sadie Schaus and Ryan Schildcrout

What do measles, the flu, and most recently, COVID-19 have in common? Each of these viruses has vaccines which have been developed to prevent infection, reduce the severity of symptoms, and promote faster recovery. So what are vaccines and how do they work? The answer varies from vaccine to vaccine. Historically, vaccines have been created by weakening or outright killing viruses before injecting them into patients to expose them to viral proteins. Once injected, the body attacks the virus, priming the immune system for a later date where you’re exposed to the virus at full strength. However, the process of creating a vaccine from a weakened virus can be long and difficult. Fortunately, scientists have been hard at work trying to create vaccines which are as effective as the current vaccine standard, but can be produced more quickly in response to global needs.

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