SBME Seminar with Dr. Angela Yu – RNA folding and processing in biology and disease

Meeting ID: 953 9364 5730

Password: 645730

Location: DMCBH 101 Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health Building

RNA structure formation happens cotranscriptionally, in other words while RNAs are being synthesized, and occurs in the order of microseconds. In addition, RNA regulation processes such as splicing and polyadenylation occur cotranscriptionally, and these processes have been implicated in a plethora of diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy. While therapeutics may be able to target and correct these processes, we still lack a complete understanding of how RNA cotranscriptional folding mediates these processes, presenting a barrier to designing effective therapeutics. In this talk I will discuss my previous and ongoing work on cotranscriptional RNA structure characterization and prediction, anti-cancer drug-induced inhibition of polyadenylation, and design of drug-sensitive polyadenylation RNA switches. RNA structure probing, massively parallel reporter assays (MPRA’s), and artificial intelligence are key tools utilized in these research projects and revealed sequence-dependent effects on cotranscriptional RNA structure and processing. My future work aims to discover fundamental principles of dynamic RNA folding that influence RNA processing and translating this understanding into the development of new RNA therapeutics.

Dr. Angela Yu’s Biography:

Dr. Angela Yu started her research career at the University of Pennsylvania and majored in Computational Biology in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Angela went on to pursue her Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and worked with Prof. Julius Lucks in creating tools for studying cotranscriptional RNA folding with RNA structure probing. She led the computational efforts and created the first method that utilized cotranscriptional RNA structure probing data. These methods have been used to study bacterial noncoding RNAs and riboswitches. Her research has been highlighted in the National Institutes of Health Director’s Blog and Nature.

She was a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and worked in Prof. Georg Seelig’s lab at the University of Washington. There, Angela utilized massively parallel reporter assays and machine learning to better understand human cotranscriptional RNA processing in disease contexts.

Angela is now an Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Therapeutic Innovation Center and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Her group uses both computational and experimental approaches to understand cotranscriptional RNA processing and engineer potential therapeutics that act during RNA synthesis.

Social media: https://yurnalab.org/
Bluesky = @rna-lab.bsky.social