Wednesday, 9th March, 2016, 12:00

"The evolution of antisense gene expression"

Abstract:

The advent of high­throughput genomic technologies has revealed that the transcriptome is more complex than initially thought. There are thousands of loci that transcribe transcripts that lack long conserved ORFs. Antisense transcripts or natural antisense transcripts are an intringuing class of RNAs transcribed from the opposite strand of a known gene. While some of these genes are reported to be functional, most of them are likely to be byproducts of the high transcriptional activity of the genome.

We use deep strand­specific RNA sequencing to quantify and characterize the presence of antisense genes in human, finding that antisense transcription is widespread and that a high proportion of protein­coding genes are associated to antisense transcripts. We classify the age of antisense genes using homology searches against the transcriptomes assembled in chimpanzee, macaque and mouse. Birth and turnover of antisense genes is common in the primate lineage, being most of those genes non­coding and non­functional. We further find evidences of new translated proteins in some of those antisense genes, indicating that, from an evolutionary perspective, these transcripts are not useless, as they provide the 'raw material' for the evolution of new molecular functions mapper"

Speaker: Jorge Ruiz Orera - Evolutionary Genomics group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF)

Room Aula room 473.10 (4th floor)