Events by this organizer

Presenter:

Neville Sanjana, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biology
Neuroscience and Physiology
NYU School of Medicine and Core Faculty Member
New York Genome Center

Forward genetic screens using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)–associated nucleases like Cas9 are a powerful tool to pinpoint genes involved in disease. Initial screens capitalized on genome-scale libraries to perturb nearly all protein-coding genes in the human genome to examine therapeutic resistance and gene essentiality in cancer cell lines.

Dr. Sanjana’s lab has further developed the CRISPR screening toolbox in several new directions, including in vivo screens to understand drivers of lung metastasis, saturation mutagenesis of noncoding regions to identify functional elements that drive chemotherapeutic resistance in melanoma, and screens that dissect complex interactions between tumor cells and primary immune cells in cancer immunotherapy. Recently, they developed the first RNA-targeting CRISPR screens in melanoma and combined CRISPR perturbations of chromatin modifiers with single-cell measurements of chromatin accessibility. Taken together, these new frontiers expand the potential of CRISPR screens for fundamental genomic discovery, gene regulation, and therapeutic development to overcome drug resistance.

Human cells generate remarkable regulatory and functional complexity from a finite set of genes. Production of mRNA isoforms through alternative RNA processing and modifications is essential for generating this complexity. With the rapid accumulation of cancer RNA-seq data in public repositories, there is an unprecedented opportunity to elucidate the landscape and functional consequence of mRNA isoform variation in cancer. In this talk, Dr. Xing will discuss his lab’s computational tools for characterizing mRNA isoform variation, as well as key biological insights obtained when applying these tools to massive RNA-seq data across cancer and normal transcriptomes. Collectively, they have uncovered mRNA isoforms and associated regulatory networks that play crucial roles in tumor development and progression and have identified novel targets for therapy development.

Following the webinar, there will be a Question and Answer session for anyone with questions about mRNA isoform computational tools (rMATS, DARTS, new tools) from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. It will be held at the same meeting link as the webinar.