Small RNA and Cyanobacteria

Characteristics of Cyanobacteria Aquatic Photosynthetic Usually unicellular

Importance of Cyanobacteria Atmosphere Chloroplast

Encoded in the intergenic regions What is sRNA? Encoded in the intergenic regions

Why do we want to learn about sRNAs? To predict them in any genome of an organism To experimentally analyze their function To control gene expression

Why have few sRNAs been found? Very small (usually 40-300 nt) Less sensitive to point mutations Function at the 2º structure level Do not encode protein sequence No coding signals (start/stop codon)

How Biolingua can search for sRNAs in cyanobacteria? Compare the sequences of intergenic regions by BLAST These results will include both an e-value and a percent identical score Run the similar sequences from multiple organisms thru RNAz, which predicts if an RNA exists by its 2º structure

To further verify an sRNA… M-Fold: takes a potential RNA sequence and incorporates its structure Experiments: test by northern blot analysis

Jeff Elhai and Dr. You Chen Acknowledgements: Jeff Elhai and Dr. You Chen