Wednesday, 31th May, 2017, 12:00 - 13:00

Measuring ribosome profiling at isoform level: a step towards unveiling alternative splicing funcional impact

The alternative processing of transcribed genomic loci through alternative transcript initiation, splicing and polyadenylation, is an intermediate step in mRNA maturation, between transcription and translation. These mechanisms produce different mature mRNA transcripts and determine the transcript repertoire of cells. There is evidence showing that the differential production of transcript isoforms, especially through the mechanism of alternative splicing, is crucial in multiple biological processes such as cell differentiation, acquisition of tissue-specific functions, DNA repair, as well as in multiple pathologies, including cancer. This has been exhaustively shown at RNA level but it remains elusive at protein level. Sequencing of ribosome-protected RNA fragments, or ribosome profiling, provides detailed information on the transcripts being translated in the cell. In this work, we have analysed the quantification of individual transcript coding sequences (CDSs) from ribosome profiling using both RNA-seq and Ribo-seq data from human and murine gliomas. Moreover, we investigated to what extend differential transcript usage and differential splicing impacts protein production. We describe for the first time evidence for differential translation of coding regions associated to differential transcript usage and alternative splicing, and in particular for the differential translation of microexons, which have a crucial role in neural tissue.

Speaker: Marina Reixachs, Computational RNA Biology, GRIB (IMIM/UPF)

Room Aula 473.10 (PRBB, 4th floor)