Circular RNA: The Surprising Discovery of a Highly Expressed RNA Species with Statistical Models

• Activity Number: 476
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Julia Salzman*+
• Companies: Stanford University
• Keywords: rna-seq ; high throughput sequencing data ; false discovery rate ; NGS

Abstract

Using statistical models and comprehensive examination of RNA-Seq data, we recently reported the unexpected observation that thousands of genomic loci in human and mouse give rise to circular RNA transcripts, and that at many of these loci, the circular isoform is in fact the dominant RNA isoform. More recently, we have shown widespread circular RNA expression includes species such as Drosophila and estimate that in humans, circular RNA may account for as many as 1% as many molecules as poly(A) RNA. We will discuss some of the statistical approaches used to uncover and quantitate these novel molecules several of which have very broad application to analysis of next generation sequencing data.