In fission yeast, the formation of centromeric heterochromatin is induced through the RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated pathway. Some pre-mRNA splicing mutants (prp) exhibit defective formation of centromeric heterochromatin, suggesting that splicing factors play roles in the formation of heterochromatin, or alternatively that the defect is caused by impaired splicing of pre-mRNAs encoding RNAi ...

Strand-specific RNA sequencing of S. pombe revealed a highly structured programme of ncRNA expression at over 600 loci. Waves of antisense transcription accompanied sexual differentiation. A substantial proportion of ncRNA arose from mechanisms previously considered to be largely artefactual, including improper 3' termination and bidirectional transcription. Constitutive induction of the entire...

Enterococcus faecalis is a commensal bacterium and a major opportunistic human pathogen. In this study, we combined in silico predictions with a novel 5'RACE-derivative method coined '5'tagRACE', to perform the first search for non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) encoded on the E. faecalis chromosome. We used the 5'tagRACE to simultaneously probe and characterize primary transcripts, and demonstrate here ...

RNA-protein complexes are essential in mediating important fundamental cellular processes, such as transport and localization. In particular, ncRNA-protein interactions play an important role in post-transcriptional gene regulation like mRNA localization, mRNA stabilization, poly-adenylation, splicing and translation. The experimental methods to solve RNA-protein interaction prediction problem ...

Transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) have so far been applied to disrupt protein-coding genes which constitute only 2-3% of the genome in animals. The majority (70-90%) of the animal genome is actually transcribed as non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), yet the lack of efficient tools to knockout ncRNA genes hinders studies on their in vivo functions. Here we have developed novel strat...

Interest in non-coding regions of DNA has been increasing since the mapping of the human genome revealed that human DNA contains far fewer genes encoding proteins than previously expected. However, analysis of the derivatives of DNA transcription (transcriptomics) revealed that the majority of the genetic material is transcribed into non-coding RNA (ncRNA), indicating that these molecules proba...

How is noise in gene expression modulated? Do mechanisms of noise control impact genome organization? In yeast, the expression of one gene can affect that of a very close neighbor. As the effect is highly regionalized, we hypothesize that genes in different orientations will have differing degrees of coupled expression and, in turn, different noise levels. Divergently organized gene pairs, in p...

UV damage to the skin leads to the release of noncoding RNA (ncRNA) from necrotic keratinocytes that activates Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3). This release of ncRNA triggers inflammation in the skin following UV damage. Recently, TLR3 activation was also shown to aid wound repair and increase the expression of genes associated with permeability barrier repair. Here, we sought to test whether skin ...