Genome engineering and RNA interference

Coordinators

Christine Lelandais, Céline Sorin

Goals

The objective of this teaching will be to explore the methodologies of genome engineering, RNA interference and synthetic biology and to understand their underlying fundamental biological mechanisms. Challenges in medicine and agronomy and ethical/legal issues will be discussed.

Skills

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Design an adequate strategy of RNAi or genome editing, using CRISPR-Cas or other technologies;
• Understand the design of regulatory circuits or metabolic pathway in synthetic biology;
• Be aware of the recent fields of applications and ethical issues of these biotechnologies.
• Gain autonomy in basic molecular and cellular biology technics used to validate the efficiency of a RNAi constructs and/or to analyse small non coding RNAs.
• Organize themselves (or by two) to perform several experiments in parallel, like in labs
• Collaborate inside a working team
• Analyse, criticize and present their experimental results (oral and written report)
• Integrate results obtained by different scales of analysis (from DNA to the plant level) to answer a complex biological question.

Content

1st week: courses, tutorials and seminars on genome editing, RNA interference (and other RNA-based technologies) and synthetic biology. Several seminars will be given by reseachers, platform engineers and professionals from private companies, specialized in one of these fields.
 During this practical course, students will first analyse different Arabidopsis lines, that are silenced -or not- for a reporter transgene. For that, they will carry on several experiments, that are commonly used to estimate the efficiency of a RNAi approach and/or to analyse small RNAs (RT-qPCR, DNA methylation analysis, dedicated northern for small RNAs, tissue and subcellular localisation of proteins using fluorescence microscopy, …).

Language : English

Elective TU

ECTS : 4

Lectures : 8 ;  Directed Study : 7; Practical Study : 21