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Speaker:  Professor Rebecca Oakey, Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics, King’s College London

Imprinted loci as a model for studying epigenetic regulation of alternative polyadenylation

Host: Mathias Gautel

Abstract: The transcriptome of a cell is regulated by epigenetic mechanisms including DNA methylation and histone modifications. Imprinted genes are ideal models for studying epigenetic mechanisms because they have an active and a silenced allele of identical DNA sequence in the same cellular context. Imprinted retrogenes arose through retrotransposition of multi-exonic genes into the introns of host genes, disrupting canonical transcripts and imposing imprinted expression. These models provide a way to study epigenetic modifications at intragenic promoters to show how they influence alternative polyadenylation and transcriptome diversity. There are thousands of intragenic promoters in the mammalian genome and how they influence the expression of host genes is not completely understood. Here we look closely at a model locus and use a genome wide approach to understand more about tissue-specific gene expression.