University of Pittsburgh Department of Biological Sciences presents:
Spring 2021 Seminar Series
Dr. Stirling Churchman
Harvard Medical School
"From the Nucleus to the Mitochondria: Gene Expression Regulation at High Resolution"
Monday, February 1, 2021
Virtual- Zoom Meeting
11:00 A.M. EST
Host: Dr. Sarah Hainer
Abstract:
The seminar will discuss our efforts to investigate gene regulatory processes occurring throughout the cell, from the nucleus to the mitochondria. We have recently established co-transcriptional processing (nano-COP) that probes transcriptional processing. These approaches monitor where, when and how
splicing occurs across long human nascent transcripts that contain multiple introns. We found that splicing occurs in human cells after minutes on average, and interestingly, we observe that proximal introns are more often spliced together than introns spaced apart, indicating that splicing of proximal introns is coordinated. I will also discuss our work towards answering a fundamental question in eukaryotic gene expression: how are nuclear- and mitochondrialencoded genes co-regulated? We are developing genome-wide approaches to probe how the mitochondrial genome is regulated, from DNA structure to translational control. I will cover our latest work in this area.