The Selfish Ribosomal RNA Genes

Date/Time: 06 June 2013, 2:00 PM
Speaker: Pawel Michalak, Ph.D
Speaker Affiliation: Associate Professor, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech
Venue: JABSOM, Kaka’ako, Medical Education Building (MEB) Auditorium (Room 315)

For more info: Kyungim Baek [ kyungim (at) hawaii.edu ]
Description: Nucleolar dominance is a dramatic epigenetic phenomenon by which cells of
interspecies hybrids selectively express the 45S rRNA precursor and form
nucleoli from the chromosomes of only a single progenitor, typically
dependent on species rather than maternal or paternal effects. Genome-wide
approaches enable us to shed new light on patterns, mechanisms, and
consequences of nucleolar dominance, a phenomenon observed long before the
discovery of DNA structure, yet to this date remaining a major cytogenetic
puzzle. With its extreme genomic and epigenomic patterns of reprogramming,
comparable only with X chromosome inactivation, nucleolar dominance in
Xenopus hybrid genomes provides a fascinating model for understanding the
regulation of rRNA expression, nucleolus formation, and transgenerational
effects. We have observed that inheritance of rRNA genes is largely
non-Mendelian, a plausible hallmark of genomic conflicts whereby certain
alleles are transmitted from one generation to the next in a biased manner.
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