Rolf Backofen: "RNA Dark Matter"

Prof. Rolf Backofen
Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg

RNA Dark Matter

In the past years, the common view of RNA has evolved from a more or less boring in-termediate in protein translation to a very important player in cell regulation. The changed role was primarily the result of the detection of thousands of non-coding RNAs with many different regulatory functions in post-translational regulation. New experimen-tal evidence indicate that while only ~1% of the human genome is translated into pro-teins, about 80%-90% of the genome is transcribed into non-coding RNA. This vast layer of regulation was remained hidden from the view until just recently.

We will discuss various topics related to the analysis of non-coding RNAs especially on the boundary of biology and soft matter. Main biological problems is the finding of non-coding RNAs as well as the decection of putative RNA targets. Both problems require the prediction of (secondary) structures, which is usually done using a thermodynamic approach. However, it is well known that the kinetic aspects and the energy landscape of secondary structure plays an important role as well.