Lecture 2. Long non-coding RNAs: Genomic Junk or Regulatory Treasure? (ENG)

Jordan RAMILOWSKI, PhD (YCU)

Lecture Abstract

Although mRNAs and their protein products have been taking a main stage in biological and medical research, tens of thousands of loci in mammalian genomes encode for so-called long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). These mysterious lncRNAs are broadly defined as mature transcripts at least 200nt long and without protein coding potential. lncRNAs are also known to be generally lowly expressed, cell type specific and poorly conserved across species. Most importantly, in the last decade or so, many publications started to uncover important functions of lncRNAs in normal cell functioning and in disease. Regardless, biological roles of most of lncRNAs still remain unknown, while many researchers remain to question lncRNA functionality.

In this lecture, I will first broadly introduce lncRNA field and show how our FANTOM Consortium have previously used bioinformatics approaches to functionally characterize human lncRNAs (Nature 543 (7644), 199, 2017; Genome research 30 (7), 1060, 2020). I will also share our most recent findings on the potential regulatory roles of thousands of known and novel lncRNAs we discovered when analyzing dendritic cell (DCs) differentiation data. Although we still lack a proof if and how lncRNAs influence the development of this very important immune control towers, our extensive analyses of multi-omics data show that many lncRNA form a co-regulatory network with enhancers and mRNAs crucial to DC differentiation and functioning.

In summary, I hope this lecture will make you better understand potential biological roles of lncRNAs and perhaps even interest you in using bioinformatics/AI tools and methods to study lncRNA in your research system.