Discovering and understanding small regulatory RNAs from plants

At the molecular level, the survival of organisms depends upon the precise control of gene expression. Understanding the control of gene expression is a fundamental problem in Biology with numerous practical applications. One important way in which gene expression is controlled is via small regulatory RNAs. Small RNAs function to bring various protein complexes into proximity with targeted messenger RNAs, with the typical consequence repression of the target gene's expression. My talk will focus on my group's efforts over the last 12 years to discover plant small RNAs, understand how they work, and to develop new methods to study them. This has included studies on the evolution of plant small RNAs, development of novel techniques and software for the analysis of small RNAs, and discovery of new paradigms of small RNA functions.