Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: PITÁGORAS DE AZEVEDO ALVES SOBRINHO

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : PITÁGORAS DE AZEVEDO ALVES SOBRINHO
DATE: 25/06/2020
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: BioME / Vídeoconferência
TITLE:

RNA Nexus: a novel software for annotation of ncRNA and functional prediction

KEY WORDS:

RNA, non-coding, software, functional prediction, annotation.

PAGES: 27
BIG AREA: Ciências Biológicas
AREA: Biologia Geral
SUMMARY:

The non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) consist of RNA molecules which are not translated into proteins. Instead, the many types of ncRNA play important roles in genome defense and transcription regulation processes, among other functions. Given the low levels of expression and conservation they have, when compared to coding genes, the identification of these RNA can be difficult. Current pipelines for ncRNA identification do not include routines for integrating available public data in the results, as well as to address the specifics of lncRNA identification, a class whose prediction is complicated because its genes can be structurally similar to coding genes. In addition, there are very few functional characterizations for known lncRNA, which makes it difficult to interpret the roles of these genes in the organism. Many researchers have applied In Silico functional prediction through co-expression in order to reveal functional annotations, but there is no consensus on what correlation metrics or parameters to use and there is a lack of ready and available software for users to perform such predictions on species other than Homo Sapiens. Considering the current state of the art, this work describes the development of an integrated pipeline for the creation of ncRNA annotations, including several tools and data from public databases, so that different types of ncRNA can be identified. A tool of functional prediction for lncRNA was also developed, including non-linear correlation metrics, never before applied to ncRNAs. Making use of a semantic similarity measure for the comparison of annotations, confidence levels were defined for the metrics used in functional prediction. The effectiveness of using different metrics, as well as their possible combinations, was evaluated in these confidence levels by comparing the predictions to a large set of reference functional annotations from Mus Musculus lncRNA. Os resultados evidenciam a importância de levar em consideração relações de co-expressão não-lineares entre reguladores e alvos, além das relações lineares. The results show that it is important to consider non-linear co- expression relationships between regulators and targets, as well as the linear ones. Our tests for the ncRNA annotation pipeline indicate that it is capable of identifying lncRNAs, snRNAs, snoRNAs, tRNAs, rRNAs, SRP RNAs and precursor RNAs, among others. The developed tool, called RNA Nexus, is a free software that aims to abstract the complexities of ncRNA In Silico researching, in such a way that previous barriers of programming knowledge are no longer required. With this, it is expect to make the studies on ncRNAs faster and more complete, accelerating and facilitating the expansion of knowledge about these molecules that are essential for many organisms.

BANKING MEMBERS:
Interno - 2170415 - JORGE ESTEFANO SANTANA DE SOUZA
Presidente - 055.795.577-79 - WILFREDO BLANCO FIGUEROLA - UFRN