Prof. SHAN Ge from the School of Life Sciences at University of Science and Technology of China was invited to visit IHB on January 24, 2018. 

On January 24, 2018, Prof. SHAN Ge from the School of Life Sciences at University of Science and Technology of China was invited to visit Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of Chinese Academy of Sciences and gave an academic presentation entitled "Regulation of Gene Expression by Non-coding RNAs".  

In the presentation, Prof. Shan briefly introduced the distinction between RNA and non-coding RNA as well as various functions of non-coding RNA. He presented a series of innovative research results obtained by his lab in the field of non-coding RNA, including exogenous Non-coding RNA which plays a regulatory role in gene expression, non-coding RNA which can participate in the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression, RNAi pathways and small, non-coding RNAs which have a regulatory effect on the assembly and function of centromere / kinetochore and small artificial aptamers which can also be used to regulate gene expression.  

He focused on the recent work of his lab in the field of lncRNA regulating RNA alternative splicing. It is found that a small RNA (5S-OT) transcribed by RNA polymerase II has different differences in 5sRNA alternative splicing regulation of different cell types. Further analysis showed that the interaction between 5S-OT and U2AF65 gene regulated alternative splicing, 5sRNA gene in human and primate animal containing the Py sequence, 5S-OT can identify the sequence of 5sRNA gene by alternative splicing increases. In other organisms, such as yeast, zebrafish and mice, there is no Py sequence in the 5sRNA gene and less alternative splicing of the 5sRNA gene. Toward the end of his presentation, Prof. Shan also designed a biosynthetic method that utilizes the 5S-OT and U2AF65 gene interactions to regulate alternative RNA splicing.