3:00pm - 3:30pm

Dr. Hong-Gu Kang

Biology, Texas State University

Title: Overlooked small RNAs derived from tRNAs in plant immunity: a cautionary tale in building bioinformatics pipelines and the importance of a biological context in computer science

Abstract: Next-gen sequencing (NGS) is used to determine the nucleotide information in entire genomes or targeted regions of DNA or RNA. NGS has revolutionized the biological sciences, allowing researchers to perform a wide range of experiments and study biological systems at an unprecedented level. To deal with the massive amount of data generated from NGS applications, it has been commonly practiced among data scientists to remove a portion of the dataset, which is tricky to analyze computationally. For instance, removing reads from rRNA and tRNA for transcriptome analysis is widely accepted in post-sequencing analysis, while these RNAs are the dominant kinds in the transcriptome. My group has sought to identify a molecule responsible for transcriptional reprogramming in response to a challenge to a bacterial challenge in plants. While traditional bioinformatics pipelines failed to pin down the molecule, we successfully demonstrated that small RNAs derived from tRNA are a critical player in plant immunity. The insight gained from this endeavor will be discussed.