Tel: (05)2720411 ext. Office 66515 Lab 61524
Fax: (05)2722871
Email: bioycyu@ccu.edu.tw
Ph. D. National Taiwan University.
My interest is to explore the functional roles of non-colinear RNAs in biological processes, especially in pluripotency and cancer diseases. Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), including embryonic stem cell (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), have the abilities of unlimited self‐renewal and pluripotent differentiation, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study early embryo development and disease. Cancer cells also share some characteristics of PSCs, such as unlimited self-renewal or limited ability of differentiation.
Non-colinear RNAs, which include trans-spliced RNAs (tsRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs), are RNA transcripts with exon order inconsistent with that in genome. Trans-spliced RNAs are generated by trans-splicing, in which two or more RNA transcripts are ligased into a chimeric transcript. CircRNAs are generated by back-splicing, in which the 5’ terminus of upstream exon is ligased to 3’ terminus of downstream exon. The tsRNAs may encode a new chimeric protein or server as non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), while circRNA are generally recognized as long ncRNAs.
My previous researches showed that both tsRNAs and circRNAs are involved in pluripotency maintenance. tsRMST recruits PCR2 complex and NANOG to repress differentiation-associated gene expression (Figure 1), while circBIRC6 inhibits the activity of miR-34a and miR-145 to protect NANOG, OCT4, SOX2 (Figure 2).
Accordingly, I will focus on the following projects:
Project 1: The functional role of non-colinear RNAs in reprogramming of iPSCs
Project 2: The functional roles of non-colinear RNAs in germ layers differentiation.
Project 3: The regulatory network of non-colinear RNAs in PSCs and cancer cells.
Figure 1:
Figure 2 :
