最先端研究セミナー

Abstract:

Omics technologies uncovered the high complexity of biological systems and shook up our understanding of mammalian gene. Deep-sequencing of cDNAs revealed that many and strong transcriptional activities are detected outside of the genomic regions we recognized as genes then. Most of these newly discovered transcribed regions are provisionally annotated to be noncoding RNA genes based mainly on absence of long open reading frames (ORFs). However, more recently, ribosomal profiling suggested that translation seems to occur in many of the small ORFs within the RNA regions acknowledged as “noncoding” or “untranslated” and even to be initiated at not only AUG codons but also many non-AUG codons. However, whether the novel translation products are stably present and functional in cells remains unaddressed.

Our group currently pursues functional significance of translational activities within long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and 5’ untranslated regions (5’UTRs) of mammalian protein genes. And we recently found one small ORF in the 5’UTR of a mammalian RNA translation of which plays vital roles in neurological function. In this seminar, with introducing our latest data, I will discuss the potential implications of our findings as well as biological meanings of translation activities in mammalian noncoding RNA regions in general.