学术报告
题目：Temporal Organization of Inflammatory Genes
报告人：Shengli Hao, Ph.D.
Biology Division, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
时间： Thursday 10:30 a.m., August 23rd
地点：生命科学学院411会议室
Like many other biological processes, inflammation is controlled by the cooperative action of thousands of genes. The long term goal of my study is to understand how inflammatory genes are functionally

organized at the genomic level. Using microarray gene chip technique, we found that the TNF (an inflammatory mediator) inducible genes can be classified into three groups based on their activation patterns and

these group are correlated with their timing of expression (Group I genes predominantly act first, then Group II, and then Group III genes). In addition, genes with related functions have similar activation patterns, suggesting that inflammatory genes are temporally organized to function in groups. Further studies have revealed that the activation pattern of a gene is well conserved and mainly determined by the stability of its mRNA and the structure of the 3` untranslated region (UTR) of the gene. The transcription initiation has been considered for decades as the step to control temporal order of gene expression. Using our recently developed method, we were able to directly test this notion and found surprisingly that late genes are initiated almost simultaneously as early genes and the sequential gene expression is set to some extent at the step of RNA splicing. All these results support the idea that an RNA molecule encodes not only the protein sequence but also the timing of its expression probably in the structures of its UTRs and the exon-intron junctions.
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