Poster abstracts

Poster number 22 submitted by Will Foran

Developing an in silico pipeline for sequence analysis of small RNAs in human pathogens

Will Foran (Biology)

Abstract:
Antisense transcription of mRNA regions is known to be capable of affecting gene expression. To assess if there is evidence for this in Plasmodium falciparum, mixed blood stage sRNA was sequenced and mapped to the genome. Contigs meeting length and expression metrics that could also be mapped complementary to gene regions were ranked. This was then correlated to stage specific gene expression annotated in PlasmoDB.

Regions upstream of highly expressed contigs, including both regions mapped antisense to intergenic and intragenic genomic positions, were also examined for common motifs using a discriminative algorithm. The motif elucidated within 1000nts upstream of these regions is very similar to that found upstream of tRNAs.

Keywords: Plasmodium falciparum, sRNA