The beginning of the week - and the great news! Eugene Baulin from Bujnicki Lab with EMBO fellowship! Congratulations!

EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowships support excellent postdoctoral researchers throughout Europe and the world for a period of up to two years. International mobility is a key requirement. The fellowship includes a salary or stipend, a relocation allowance and support for fellows with children. Awardees can attend an EMBO Laboratory Leadership course and become part of the global network of EMBO Fellows.

The title and summary of the awarded project is: "Exploring RNA folds and remote evolutionary relationships with an improved structural similarity search method".

SUMMARY:

To fully understand the functions and interactions of biological macromolecules, knowledge of their molecular structures is essential. Currently, our knowledge of non-coding RNAs and their structural diversity remains very limited, although the understanding of their importance for many cellular processes is growing rapidly. For the majority of known non-coding RNA families, structure, function, and evolutionary relationships are unknown. I propose a novel approach to RNA sequence comparison based on an encoding of RNA sequence (AUCG) and secondary structure data (5 states) into a 20-letter alphabet. Using the encoding with a specific substitution matrix, I will apply gold-standard tools developed for the 20-letter amino acid alphabet to search for distant homologies and structural similarities undetectable by existing approaches. Preliminary results show that our method improves both sensitivity and specificity compared to conventional methods. My experience in studying RNA tertiary motifs and database development along with the host lab experience in RNA structure modeling will be key to building a comprehensive map of RNA structural similarities that can be used to detect relationships between RNA families and domains in long non-coding RNAs that share common structural motifs with considerable sequence-level divergence. Such a map, together with the association of RNA folds with recurrent 3D motifs, will enable faster and more accurate modeling of RNA 3D structures and improve structure-based RNA function prediction. The results are likely to improve the general approach of RNA structure prediction and studies of RNA evolution and have profound implications for the field of RNA biology.

Eugene Baulin

from BujnickiLab

with EMBO fellowship