Silencing RNAs: organisers and coordinators of complexity in eukaryotic organisms
Welcome to the SIROCCO Project
RNA silencing is a natural mechanism of gene regulation in cells. Small double-stranded RNA molecules 20-28 nucleotides long trigger the degradation of target RNA or DNA, thereby reducing specific gene expression. There is the potential to create small regulatory RNAs (siRNAs) that can be introduced into cells and silence genes that cause diseases.
The goals of the SIROCCO project are
- to exploit RNA silencing mechanisms in order to improve human and plant health
- to reveal how siRNAs play a role in developmental biology and disease defense
- to provide fundamental insights into the genetic networks that underlie normal and diseased embryonic development and adult growth
Project Announcements
Next SIROCCO Annual Meeting 11-13 October 2010 Heidelberg
This year’s SIROCCO Annual Meeting will take place at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg 11-13 October 2010
Registration by email to Aileen Hogan fah37@cam.ac.uk by 18 July.
The SIROCCO AGM will precede the EMBO/EMBL Symposium ‘The Non-Coding Genome’ 13-16 October (Elisa Izaurralde, organizer). To register for this please visit:
http://www.embo-embl-symposia.org/symposia/2010/EES10-03/index.html
A detailed description of our research program can be found on our About Page.
Partners have access to a Private Partners page including discounts and reporting documents.
There is also a Data and Bioinformatics site available which aggregates the various bioinformatic and resources developed and hosted by the SIROCCO consortium.
Recent Publications
Dalakouras A, Tzanopoulou M, Tsagris M, Wassenegger M, Kalantidis K. Hairpin transcription does not necessarily lead to efficient triggering of the RNAi pathway. Transgenic Res. 2010 Jun 26. [Epub ahead of print]
Todesco M, Balasubramanian S, Hu TT, Traw MB, Horton M, Epple P, Kuhns C, Sureshkumar S, Schwartz C, Lanz C, Laitinen RA, Huang Y, Chory J, Lipka V, Borevitz JO, Dangl JL, Bergelson J, Nordborg M, Weigel D. Natural allelic variation underlying a major fitness trade-off in Arabidopsis thaliana. Nature. 2010 Jun 3;465(7298):632-6.
Laursen MB, Pakula MM, Gao S, Fluiter K, Mook OR, Baas F, Langklaer N, Wengel SL, Wengel J, Kjems J, Bramsen JB. Utilization of unlocked nucleic acid (UNA) to enhance siRNA performance in vitro and in vivo. Mol Biosyst. 2010 May 10;6(5):862-70. Epub 2010 Feb 9.
Braun JE, Tritschler F, Haas G, Igreja C, Truffault V, Weichenrieder O, Izaurralde E. The C-terminal alpha-alpha superhelix of Pat is required for mRNA decapping in metazoa. EMBO J. 2010 Jun 11. [Epub ahead of print]
Herranz H, Cohen SM. MicroRNAs and gene regulatory networks: managing the impact of noise in biological systems. Genes Dev. 2010 Jul 1;24(13):1339-44. Review.
Latest News
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New Partners Join the SIROCCO Consortium
The SIROCCO consortium welcomes three new partners selected by competitive call who will participate for the remainder of the project
Anton Enright at the EBI and Jaak Vilo at Quretec are developing computational methods for the analysis of sRNA datasets produced in the consortium, as well as improved data submission and management tools.
Markus Stoffel at ETHZ is developing technologies to substitute, overexpress or silence sRNAs in vivo using knockout mouse models.
UEA Animal Small RNA Toolkit
A toolkit for analyzing large-scale animal small RNA datasets.
Tools available include
- Sequence file pre-processing: Sequence adaptor removal and conversion to FASTA format
- Filter tool: Filter sequences in large-scale data sets
- miRProf: Expression profiles of known miRNAs from large scale sRNA data sets
- miRCat: Identification of miRNA sequences in large-scale sRNA data sets
- SiLoCo: Identification and comparison of sRNA-producing loci in large-scale data sets
- SiLoMa: Generate graphical maps of individual sRNA loci.
- RNA folding/annotation: For highlighting sRNA locations on a folded RNA sequence.