Two undergraduate and one graduate student at Korea University’s life science department have developed CLIPick, an analytical system capable of identifying the regulators of electronic RNA binding.

From left; Park Si-hyeong, Cho Eun-sol and Ahn Seung-hyeon

CLIPick is a new bioinformatics analytical technique that can detect more specifically and sensitively the binding that occurs between RNA and regulating elements of genes in diseases such as cancer and heart ailments, at a transcript level.

As undergraduate research students, Park Si-hyeong developed and implemented the analytical technology, and Cho Eun-sol used it to discover a new target sequence characteristic of microRNA, a gene regulatory regulator. Graduate student Ahn Seung-hyeon compared it with existing analysis technology and data to confirm its superiority.

In many diseases, RNA regulators are known to combine with various transcriptional RNAs to control target gene expression and alter their biological function and cause infections.

Therefore, to understand such regulation, experts developed CLIP, a technique for analyzing the RNA binding site with a next-generation sequencing analyzer. However, the method has limits as it generates error depending on the degree of expression of the transcriptional RNA in the process of converting the nucleotide sequence information to the RNA binding site.

To resolve this issue, the team developed a simulation method based on RNA expression information, which resulted in a CLIPick analysis technique that yields only the binding site information at a higher resolution.

The new platform allows researchers to detect sensitive RNA binding, which was hard to obtain due to low expression levels and remove noise expressed nonspecifically due to a large amount of expression.

The team expects that CLIPick will be able to analyze more accurately the RNA-regulated binding mechanism and its characteristics in various diseases, which in turn will help researchers correctly detect RNA control abnormalities in multiple disorders and diseases and help with RNA drug development.

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