University of Southern California
Ray R. Irani Hall
Molecular and Computational Biology
Computational Biology Colloquium
Brendan Frey
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
"Deciphering the RNA Splicing Code"
Abstract:
The fundamental cellular process of alternative splicing assembles each mRNA based on carefully selected DNA subsequences. Because of this, a gene can encode many different mRNAs, depending on cell type, age and disease. There are 22,000 human genes, but we recently estimated that there are over 100,000 different mRNAs produced by splicing. The genetic information that controls splicing on a genome‑wide scale has remained a mystery until a few years ago, because it was not possible to accurately measure the levels of different splice variants. I'll describe my group's effort to solve this problem by using mRNA splicing data to assemble a 'splicing code' that accounts for tissue‑dependent splicing using combinations of hundreds of new and known RNA features. The code revealed several surprising biological results and we used the code to predict new classes of tissue‑regulated splicing, correctly predict splicing for thousands of test exons, and identify novel regulatory mechanisms that we verified using splicing reporters and mutagenesis. These results suggest that our method and the resulting splicing code will provide a foundation for understanding and predicting the complicated, genome‑wide regulation of splicing.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
1:45-2:45pm
RRI 101
