Talk abstracts

Talk on Saturday 10:25-10:40am submitted by Farshad Niazi

Bioinformatic analysis of functional long non-protein coding RNAs

Farshad Niazi (Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Case Western Reserve University), Justin Pruttivarasin, Cen Guo, Jing Li, Saba Valadkhan (Center for RNA Molecular Biology, Case Western Reserve University)

Abstract:
Long Non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have recently been the focus of much attention due to their apparently ubiquitous regulatory role in eukaryotic cells. In order to gain insight into the cellular function of this novel class of RNAs, we conducted a bioinformatic analysis mainly focused on elucidating any significant differences that might help distinguish between lncRNAs and their protein-coding counterparts and offer clues to their function. Genome-wide analyses of predicted non-coding transcripts have offerred exciting clues to the general characteristics of these transcripts, however, it is not known whether all the predicted lncRNAs indeed serve a cellular function, and it remains formally possible that many of them might code for small polypeptides. To circumvent these issues, we focused our effort on analyzing the well-established lncRNAs for which a cellular function has been identified. A detailed bioinformatic analysis was performed on this group of lncRNAs and a group of randomly selected protein-coding RNAs in parallel.

Keywords: non-coding, bioinformatic, repeat element