Within the frame of this ERC PoC “Cellphmed”, we have developed, refined, and tested an innovative methodology to characterise a so far largely unexplored sector of the RNA content of a cell, which we coined the transposcriptome.
The transposcriptome reflects the expression of some 4.5 million genomic loci derived from transposable elements (TEs), these virus-like genetic entities that make up more than half of our DNA yet were so far left unexploited because the highly repetitive nature of TE-derived sequences tremendously complicates their analysis.
Through improved DNA and RNA sequencing and novel bioinformatic pipelines as well as machine learning-based analytics, we have generated a very high-density barcode for virtually every cell in the body, whether in physiological or pathological states, with degrees of granularity 2 orders of magnitude above that obtained by analysing genes.
We successfully determined the transposcriptome of a broad range of pluripotent and differentiated cells. The market analysis we performed within this project indicated that our technology has the potential to be an important tool in the management and treatment of cancer. We are thus now pursuing this goal and starting to deploy our technology on tumour datasets.
