Tonight, I watched a shorter Nanopore Community Meeting Boston session. Anastasia McKinlay from Indiana University & HHMI presented on “Positional mapping of active versus silenced rRNA gene clusters within A. thaliana nucleolus organizer regions. McKinlay spoke about nucleolus organizer regions in Arabidopsis thaliana. These positions are difficult to understand with shorter reads. Long-read sequencing helped identify tandem repeats. To study the distribution of active RNA and methylation, McKinlay and team studied the NOR2 and NOR4 genes. Methylation information and organization of the NOR regions were also studied. DiMeLo-seq assay was used to detect m6A methylation. Pore-C was used to capture interactions in the A. thaliana genome. Novel interactions were found, too. Higher-order oganization and epigenetic profiles of rRNA genes helped understand 3D organization and activity of these regions. McKinlay noted how different the two regions are in terms of activity and organization.
