Karine Choquet from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting in Boston. The session’s title is “Genetic regulation of nascent RNA maturation revealed by direct RNA sequencing.” Newly synthesized RNAs are exported to the cytoplasm for translation. The research team was interested in learning more about RNA processing and poly(A) tail length. They developed a method to sequence nascent RNA. Several genes displayed allele-specific poly(A) tail lengths on chromatin. They also noticed that genes with allele-specific poly(A) tail lengths are enriched for allelic expression imbalance. There isn’t a clear association between length and expression. Interestingly, longer poly(A) tails occur on the most or least abundant allele. The team is studying nascent RNA, splicing, and poly(A) tail length. Choquet concluded that their new dataset is valuable for asking many other biological questions. Findings suggest that poly(A) tail length is directly or indirectly influenced by genetic variation in some genes. The effect of poly(A) tail lengths is complex, and new datasets like this one can help unravel the mysteries.
