Author: Harald Barsnes

Joint CEDAS-NORBIS Summer School

CEDAS, the Center for Data Science at the University of Bergen, and NORBIS, the Norwegian Research School in Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, and Systems Biology, invite both starting and experienced data scientists to an exciting joint summer school on data science and its biomedical applications from 7-11 August 2023.

The summer school will be held in Bergen at Hotel Zander K. It is mainly intended for PhD candidates, but also Postdocs and other researchers interested in learning more about data science are welcome to attend. As data science is relevant across a wide range of disciplines, we hope that we will be able to attract a diverse group of participants.

The summer school will feature keynotes, theoretical and practical sessions on Machine Learning, Statistics, and Visual Data Science, as well as a social program.

For more information, please visit the official summer school website: Joint CEDAS-NORBIS Summer School 2023

Probing the structure of individual RNA molecules

RNA molecules can form secondary and tertiary structures that can regulate their localization and function. These structures are rarely static and different copies of the same RNA can often adopt many different conformations. Despite this most methods are only capable of characterizing RNA at the consensus level, looking at the average over RNA molecules.

A new paper in Nucleic Acids Research from Teshome Bizuyaheu in the Valen group addresses this by developing a method to probe for structure on individual RNA molecules.  By introducing RNA modifications in a structure-dependent manner and using nanopore sequencing to decode the location of these modifications, the new method, Single Molecule Structure sequencing (SMS-seq), is able to create limited structural profiles from individual molecules.  Furthermore, since each RNA is probed at numerous places the discovery of dependencies and heterogeneity of structural features within a molecule is possible.

The paper can be found here.