NCM 2023 Singapore: Detecting RNA structures using nanopore sequencing

RNA structures are important in regulating almost every step of an RNA’s lifecycle. While high-throughput structure probing typically involves identifying chemical modifications along an RNA by reverse transcription and deep sequencing, recent developments in direct RNA sequencing enable us to detect RNA structure modifications directly using nanopores. In this talk, we describe our strategy to identify structure modifications on long RNA molecules to identify isoform-specific RNA structures in human ES and SARS-CoV-2 transcriptomes. As direct RNA sequencing allows us to obtain structure signals at a single-molecule level, we will also describe our efforts in studying single-molecule structural heterogeneity using direct RNA sequencing.