Internship description
Small RNAs (e.g. small interfering RNA, microRNA, Piwi-interacting RNA) are essential in the correct functioning of many biological processes of metazoans. To investigate the effect of ocean acidification on the small RNA profile of corals, we extracted and sequenced the small RNA fraction of a coral that was subjected to four different pCO2 levels under controlled conditions. This project will involve the use of bioinformatics tools (and possibly even self-written ones!) to analyse the changes in expression of small RNAs, and identify biologically interesting small RNAs for further downstream verification.
Deliverables/expectations
Trimming and removing low quality reads in the dataset
- Using a differential expression pipeline to identify small RNA with biologically interesting expression profiles
- Correlate small RNAs of interest to known siRNAs / miRNAs / piRNAs
- Perform further analysis on the data pending earlier results
- Write a (short) manuscript on these analyses
Faculty name
Manuel Aranda
Field of study
Biological Sciences, Computational Biology or Environmental Engineering
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Visiting Students Research Program. More information.
