The hidden transcripts of cancer: methods to find novel sequence in RNA-seq data
Nadia Davidson (WEHI)
Special Seminars in Bioinformatics
- 10:30 UZH Irchel Y17-H-05
Abstract Despite the tremendous advance offered by modern sequencing, the complexity of the transcriptome beyond gene-level expression remains largely under-explored. Much information about gene structure, splicing and the consequences of mutations are lost because of fragmentation in short-read sequencing and biases from the reference genome and its annotation. This has the greatest impact for cancer where genomic alterations drive the disease and hundreds of transcripts are novel, i.e. not seen in normal cells. In this seminar I will describe computational approaches we have developed to identify novel splicing, fusion genes and other rearrangements in RNA, using short and long read transcriptome sequencing data.
Bio Dr. Nadia Davidson is a Laboratory Head at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Australia, jointly appointed within the Blood Cells and Blood Cancer, and Bioinformatics Divisions. She received a PhD in Particle Physics from the University of Melbourne, Australia (2011) and retrained in bioinformatics under the supervision of Prof. Alicia Oshlack, first at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (2011-2019) and then at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center (2019-2021). The Davidson Laboratory, established in 2022, focuses on developing computational methods to analyse RNA sequencing data, and are involved in collaborative projects that utilise high throughput short, long, bulk and single-cell sequencing to discovery novel cancer biology. Dr Nadia Davidson is an Australian NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow, and recipient of the 2019 Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Early Career Researcher Award.