News & Events

When

Date - April 11, 2018
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

What

MS Thesis Defense – CHE 602
Title: “Computational Modeling of Small Non-Coding RNA Intramolecular Structure and the Determination of Their Collisional Cross Sections”
Advisor: Dr. Norman Chiu

Abstract:

“Computational Modeling of Small Non-Coding RNA Intramolecular Structure and the Determination of Their Collisional Cross Sections”

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays important and fundamental roles in different biological activities which include transmission of genetic information, regulation of gene expression, catalysis for biochemical reactions and biomarkers for different diseases¹. The roles they play, as well as the interactions they perform within the body, are made possible by the stable secondary RNA structures that exist in the cell. The problem however, is that even through years of experimental work to determine the structures of RNA, little is known, and the majority of RNA structures remain structurally uncharacterized. RNA may undergo different types of modifications in the cell that can potentially impact its secondary structure. In addition to having limited knowledge on the actual RNA structures, none of current analytical methods can be universally used to detect any type of RNA modification and its corresponding position that exist within a biological system. To address these issues for RNA research work as well as improving the accuracy on identifying specific RNA biomarkers, this study aims to investigate some of the intrinsic properties of RNA biomarkers that may affect the ion mobility mass spectrometric measurements of RNA samples. The long-term goal of this study is to develop an analytical method for differentiating and identifying isomeric RNA with or without any modification. Particularly, we are interested in the identification of specific isomeric RNA biomarkers which have identical nucleotide composition and high sequence similarity. MicroRNA (miR) are selected as an initial model in this study.