Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Long Noncoding RNAs: From Evolution to Function, organized by Leonard Lipovich, Jeannie T. Lee, John L. Rinn and James (Ben) Brown. The meeting will be held in Keystone, Colorado from March 15-20, 2015. It has become clear that metazoan genomes are replete with transcription from non-protein-coding regions, generating many long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) transcripts. Recent progress has enabled genome-wide mapping of lncRNAs and has unraveled unifying themes; lncRNAs function as epigenetic regulators, scaffolds, decoys, and enhancers. While these and other themes have been pursued in several meetings, the field has matured in numerous novel directions, and Drs. Lipovich, Lee, Rinn and Brown will leverage these to comprehensively characterize lncRNAs across metazoan genomes. The meeting will showcase emerging data from humans and model systems, empowered by novel genomic technologies (such as RNA-protein interaction mapping (CLIP- and RIP-seq), reverse genetics for lncRNAs not conserved in evolution (RNA sequencing in control and lncRNA-perturbed backgrounds), and proteogenomics to empirically bound the translational output of putative lncRNAomes). The goal of this Keystone Symposia meeting is to integrate novel findings, enhance previously proposed models of lncRNA function, and generate new testable hypotheses. This synthesis of RNA structure, function, evolution, and informatics will foster progress in this rapidly growing field. LncRNA function is a discovery that has revolutionized every single field of human medical and genomic biology. This meeting is relevant to the NHGRI mission in that it takes an ENCODE-empowered post-genomic perspective on lncRNA evolution and function.
The field of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) biology has gained momentum only in the last 5-10 years, and it is imperative that the lncRNA field moves to a forward-thinking focus on human health and disease. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Long Noncoding RNAs: From Evolution to Function aims to both to inspire new directions for many of the leaders in the field and to stimulate students to think beyond the current models towards insights, methods and functional studies that could lead to translational therapies.
