Our view of the central dogma of molecular biology is being challenged by the seminal discovery that eukaryotic genomes produced a vast and diverse ensemble of non-protein coding RNA molecules that are able to regulate virtually all steps of gene expression regulation.
During the past years we contributed to the annotation of ncRNAs in official genome annotations and in several biological contexts, describing some characteristics of plant lncRNAs such as their expression variability, among conditions and accessions, and their sequence conservation.
In our future work, we want to pursue the characterization of Arabidopsis lncRNAs we isolated in our recent screens, making use of the specific molecular features recently uncovered on Arabidopsis lncRNAs to determine what are the common molecular signatures of lncRNAs regulating transcription through chromatin remodeling or alternative splicing to help annotate lncRNAs in other species.
We plan to persue each of these research topics through the following axis:
Using the molecular characteristics of lncRNAs’ mode of action in the control of transcription through chromatin remodeling 2,4 or splicing 3,5 we were already able to uncover lncRNAs acting similarly. We now want to extend this approach to cluster lncRNAs with common modes of action and build a predictive model integrating specific molecular and sequence features.