INB-Lunch-Seminar

Computational modelling of siRNA-mediated RNA interference in the human system

Simon Dornseifer, Institut für Molekulare Medizin, Universität zu Lübeck

The directed control of gene expression is of central importance in biomedicine and molecular therapy. It can be facilitated via nucleic acid-based tools such as small interfering RNA (siRNA), which is central to RNA interference (RNAi), triggering post-transcriptional gene silencing. In siRNA-mediated RNAi the guide strand of a double stranded siRNA is incorporated into the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). When the guide strand recognises a complementary region of a target messenger RNA, cleavage of the mRNA is induced by the catalytically active Argonaute 2 (Ago2). Due to the complex behaviour of RNA interference, it is difficult to determine experimentally mechanistic details of the RNAi machinery in mammalian cells. We propose a computational model of the siRNA-mediated RNAi process in the human system in order to link experimental data with a quantitative and time-resolved understanding of RNAi.