Talk abstracts

Talk on Friday 05:00-06:00pm submitted by David Spector

Long non-coding RNAs involved in nuclear organization and function

David L. Spector (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

Abstract:
A major focus of our laboratory is to identify novel mechanisms of regulating gene expression with the ultimate goal of developing new approaches to understand and treat disease. Recent large-scale studies of the human and mouse genomes have revealed that although there are approximately 22,000 protein-coding genes in human and in mouse, significantly larger portions of both genomes are transcribed. Such analyses suggest that protein-coding genes alone are not sufficient to account for the complexity of higher eukaryotic organisms. It is estimated that a significant portion of the transcriptional output of the human genome represents RNA that does not encode protein and therefore either these non-coding RNAs are largely useless transcripts or they are fulfilling a wide range of unexpected functions in eukaryotic biology. We are focusing our efforts on a class of non-coding RNAs that are large (>1 kb) and retained in the nuclei of cells. We suggest that within this class of large non-coding RNAs will be found a diverse group of key regulatory molecules that will provide significant insight into basic cellular functions, developmental regulation, and disease. Such non-coding RNAs may play a much more crucial role in developmental and pathological processes than currently anticipated. I will discuss our recent progress and unexpected findings characterizing two nuclear-retained long ncRNAs.

Keywords: long noncoding RNA, gene expression, nuclear organization