The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

David Tollervey, Ph.D., director, Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. Tollervey's group works to understand the nuclear pathways that process newly transcribed RNAs and assemble the RNA-protein complexes, the mechanisms that regulate these pathways, and the surveillance activities that monitor their fidelity. They are addressing these questions using a combination of biochemistry, genetics, systems biology, and cell biology approaches, largely in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A prominent feature of their recent work has been the identification of in vivo RNA-protein interaction sites, using UV-induced crosslinking and analysis of cDNAs (CRAC). This approach has been applied to understand the ribosome synthesis pathway and functionally characterize the large numbers of long non-protein coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that are generated by pervasive transcription in yeast and other eukaryotes. In recent work Dr. Tollervey's lab has applied CRAC to analyse links between modification of RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) and the nascent transcript. These analyses generated high-resolution maps of differentially phosphorylated forms of RNAPII across thousands of transcripts from several different classes. These very complex datasets are difficult to interpret and we therefore developed a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to aid the extraction of biological insights from the high-throughput data. Dr. Tollervey will discuss the insights that these analyses give into features that underlie the different fates of lncRNA and mRNA transcripts.    

 

David Tollervey received his Ph.D. in genetics at Cambridge in the lab of Herb Arst, and then moved to the University of California, San Francisco, as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Christine Guthrie. In 1983 he relocated to a permanent post at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which he left in 1988 to move to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg as a group leader. He has been at the University of Edinburgh since 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3797