Description:

The Simpson Querrey Center for Epigenetics presents:

Sheng Zhong, PhD
Professor, Bioengineering
University of California, San Diego

“Revealing the RNA Layer of Epigenome”

If the word "epigenome" is interpreted as "on the genome", then chromatin-associated RNA (caRNA) could be regarded as a layer of the epigenome in addition to DNA and histone modifications and nucleosome occupancy. To elucidate the RNA layer of epigenome, we developed the iMARGI technology to discover caRNAs and reveal the respective genome interaction loci of each caRNA. Applying iMARGI to analyze diverse human cell types, we observed that the majority of transcription start sites in the human genome are occupied with long-range interacting caRNAs. We also found that RNA-DNA interactions in normal cells coincide with fusion RNA pairs in cancers. These data suggest an RNA-poise model, where the spatial proximity of one gene’s transcripts and the other gene’s genomic sequence poises for the creation of fusion transcripts.