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PICB Seminar: Unraveling the roles of UTRs in gene regulation by Dr Joel McManus

2017-10-11
Speaker: Joel McManus, PhD 
              Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, 
              Co-Director M.S. in Computational Biology Program, 
              Carnegie Mellon University
Work Email: mcmanus@andrew.cmu.edu
Web: https://www.bio.cmu.edu/labs/mcmanus/
Time: 1:30-4:00 pm, Nov. 10th (Friday)
Venue: Room 300, SIBS Main Building, Yueyang Road 320
Host: Prof. Li Yang 
        CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology
Title: Unraveling the roles of UTRs in gene regulation
Abstract: Messenger RNA transcript leaders (5’ UTRs) and 3’ UTRs are host to numerous regulatory sequences that influence mRNA translation efficiency and decay. Upstream open reading frames (uORFs) are particularly interesting cis-acting regulators of these processes. Recent genome-wide ribosome profiling studies suggest that thousands of uORFs initiate with non-AUG start codons. While intriguing, these non-AUG uORF predictions have been made without statistical control or validation, thus the importance of these elements remains to be demonstrated. My lab, in collaboration with others, has developed computational tools to identify statistically significant signatures of uORFs from Ribosome profiling data and novel experimental tools to test their activity. We have taken a comparative genomics approach to identify significant AUG and non-AUG uORFs conserved in multiple species of Saccharomyces yeast. I will also describe a novel reporter system we are using to test uORFs and other sequence elements in UTRs. Our results indicate that some non-AUG uORFs are translated and may play important roles in regulating gene expression.  
All are welcome, and anyone who would like to have a talk with speaker, please feel free to contact Jing MU via mujing@picb.ac.cn.