Chemical Approaches to Interrogating the Transcriptome

Although once regarded as a transient messenger of genetic information, novel and exciting roles played by RNA inside cells continue to be revealed. Nevertheless, as the list of cataloged RNAs expands there is a parallel lag in our understanding of the mechanistic basis of many RNA functions. This is in many ways due to a dearth of precise biochemical methods to understand RNA expression, structure, and function. Within this seminar I will detail our lab’s efforts to bring the power of chemistry to bare on these challenges, with particular focus on developing novel chemical reactions to measure RNA structure and chemical genetic approaches to assay RNA expression in a cell-specific manner.











Robert Spitale (University of California Irvine)