RNA – The Finch and Pea

Dexter’s Laboratory

As Eva described at Science Studio, it turns out that The Offspring’s Dexter Holland has gone back to working on his PhD in molecular biology after taking some time off to be a rockstar. His thesis is looking at the use of microRNAs by HIV during infections. Holland now as the unofficially required first author paper (PDF link; authored as Bryan Holland) needed to be allowed to defend.

Not only is the name “The Offspring” probably inspired by biology, but the famous lyric “keep ’em separated” was inspired by an experience Holland had pouring plates in graduate school, which you can hear Dexter describe in an interview about his music and science on The Nerdist Podcast.

Analyzing splicing via RNAseq

During my postdoc in Jernej Ule’s lab at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK), we studied the genome-wide regulation of splicing (aka, alternative splicing, but these days all splicing is “alternative”). This involved integrating information on protein-RNA interactions with information on splicing isoforms (mRNA transcript variants from the same gene) from next generation sequencing. I could spend hours talking to you about how complicated this type of thing can get. Or, I can show you this figure from Eduardo Eyras.