Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and at the University of Pennsylvania report an RNA-seq-based circadian transcriptome of Drosophila melanogaster brain from wild-type and period-null clock-defective animals in a paper published online in advance in Genome Research this week. "We identify several hundred transcripts whose abundance oscillates with 24-hour periods in either constant darkness or 12 hour light/dark diurnal cycles, including a number of non-coding RNAs that were not identified in previous microarray studies," the authors write. This study demonstrates "extensive circadian control of ncRNA expression, reveal the extent of clock control of alternative splicing and RNA editing, and provide a novel, genome-wide map of splicing in Drosophila brain," the team adds.
In another paper published online in advance, investigators at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany present comparative Dynamic Transcriptome Analysis, or cDTA, an approach to "monitor eukaryotic mRNA metabolism." Writing in Genome Research, the authors say that cDTA provided "absolute rates of mRNA synthesis and decay in Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells" in their experiments using Schizosaccharomyces pombe as internal standard.