A Conversation with Igor Ulitsky.

Dr. Ulitsky: I first became interested in noncoding RNAs towards the end of my PhD studies. We were looking at regulatory networks governing transcriptional regulation for protein-coding genes. Then we got interested in microRNAs, so I went for my postdoc to Dave Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute. This was around the same time that people began doing large-scale maps and seeing that there is a lot of transcription outside the boundaries of proteincoding genes producing RNAs that seemed to be very similar to mRNAs, but it wasn’t clear whether these were functional or what they might be doing. Together with another postdoc in the lab, Alena Shkumatava, we became interested in studying to what extent long noncoding RNAs are found in different species. We compared zebrafish and human and mouse and we found that there is a lot of turnover, but there is a subset of lncRNAs that is deeply conserved. They’re found throughout vertebrates and we could show that two of them were actually functionally important in development of zebrafish and that this functionality was conserved. When I started my own lab about 6 years ago, we decided to focus on understanding what kind of things these long noncoding RNAs are doing and how they’re carrying out these functions.