Week 10 (3/26-3/27/21) – We attended talks at the 5th Annual RNA Symposium on “Processing RNA” from the University of Michigan RNA Biomedicine Institute. Although conferences remain virtual for now, the RNA Biomedicine Institute put together a really good symposium. One of the highlights for us included a keynote talk by RNA structure guru Dr. Kevin Weeks. Dr. Weeks described his ongoing collaboration with Dr. Tony Mustoe on the aptly named DANCE-Seq chemical probing analysis protocol/algorithm. I’m looking forward to reading about DANCE-Seq and the insights it can supply when it is published! Another highlight for us was the combination of splicing talks. These included a keynote address by Dr. Tracy Johnston and a blitz talk by graduate student Cathy Smith. Dr. Johnston gave an amazing molecular biology seminar digging into how chromatin modifications influence splicing. I was particularly impressed with Cathy Smith’s system for understanding how variation influences splicing. In addition, we all agreed that the overall format of the Symposium was well thought out. A good example of how “less is more”. The organization committee scheduled intense sessions, but only from 11-2:30. For us this was just the right amount of time to have a diverse set of speakers, but not an overwhelming amount of information.
Upcoming (4/2/21) – We will discuss a 2018 paper by Seiler, et al. on splicing factor variants in 33 different cancer types.