Title: Computational Prediction for RNA-Protein Interaction
Speaker: Shu Yang
Department of Computer Science, CHiBi, University of British Columbia
Abstract

RNA and protein are the two main classes of molecules in the cell. Their interactions widely exists in the cell and especially, are key to post-transcriptional regulation of mRNA stability, translation, localization and splicing. RNA binding proteins (RBPs) can recognize and bind to RNA in a sequence-specific and/or structure-specific way. Previous studies have shown that: sequence-specific RBPs either recognize and bind to unstructured single-stranded RNA or require at least some of their RNA binding sites to be unpaired. Such single-strandness is defined as accessibility of that RNA sequence. My last presentation in June briefly introduced the general background of RNA-Protein Interaction and reviewed a number of representative computational methods in this field. This time I will focus on the sub-class mRNA-protein interaction, and show some of our progress on utilizing mRNA secondary structure to assess the accessibility of RBP binding sites.