MicroRNAs: One biologist's junk is another cell's regulatory molecule

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The Wet Lab is hosting a lecture by UCSD PhD student Julia Nussbacher. The lecture will be held at the La Jolla Riford Library on Tuesday, September 5th, from 6:30 – 7:30pm.

In the early days of exploring the human genome, scientists thought only the 2% of the genome that coded for proteins had any use. The rest was termed ‘junk’ DNA. We have since discovered that the remaining 98% performs regulatory functions that are critical for development and health. One type of regulatory element encodes tiny pieces of RNA that control thousands of proteins. Join Julia Nussbacher from UCSD to learn what high throughput sequencing and computational biology can tell us about these tiny molecules.