31 May 2012, 16:15
Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, seminar room 3423

State of the art in ncRNA bioinformatics

Prof. Dr. Manja Marz
(Junior-Endowed Professorship of Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung for Bioinformatics/High Throughput Analysis, FSU Jena)

Since nearly two decades non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) get more and more attention in molecular biology. Nowadays, nearly 2000 families are described in the RNA database RFAM. Sequence and secondary structure features of the ncRNA (depending on the function in the cell) play a key role in annotation and identification of ncRNAs in current genome assemblies. With standard tools we can only identify an extremely small fraction of these families.

We will discuss, why more than 50 programs exist to cover that problem, but none of them work for the majority of ncRNAs.  We will see how new approaches (e.g. dRNAseq) can help (or not help) to identify novel ncRNAs. Furthermore, we discuss why target prediction is still a mystery.