“The 15th In Silico Megabank Research Seminar” will be held on Friday, October 19.

・Date/Time: October 19(Fri.) 17:00‐18:30
・Venue: Conference Room 1 (2F), Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization
・Lecturer: Masanao Sato (National Institute for Basic Biology)
・Title: Title: Baculovirus as a New Model of the Next-Generation Biology:Strategy and the Present Status to Explore the “Current” Gene Networks

・Abstract:
Baculovirus is widely used for recombination protein expression using eucaryotic cells and on the other hand, it is one of the main tools of insect biotechnology which is utilized as biological pesticide (insecticide). While the comprehensive analysis by the next-generation sequencer and the feature extraction/system abstraction (modelization) from the extensive data based on statistics/mathematical modeling are currently available, I am working on the study of not only understanding the molecule basis of the useful traits of these baculoviruses but also the possible models of network biology and synthetic biology research.

Unlike the other many RNA viruses which pose clinical problems, baculovirus is a large-sized DNA virus. It is a system that viral genome DNA invades into the host cell nucleus and instigates all the transcription of infections, and can collect the firstly important information on viral-gene functional exercise using transcriptomes. Also, I am working on a research with an eye on the synthetic approach that designs a viral genome sequence, which is firstly because maintenance/modification of the viral genome within coliform bacillus is possible by introducing the origin of replication of coliform bacillus into the DNA genome, secondly because a genome can be modified so freely as to make a genetic approach easy and thirdly because the size of genome is “synthesizable” at about 130 kb. Furthermore, an evolution experiment in a short period of time is also possible due to the nature of virus, and it is also possible to take on a new challenge in experimental biology in terms of evolution of gene networks.

In this seminar, we will introduce a topic about the presumption of a viral gene network. Of the 141 genes in the BmNPV-T3 system that can affect a silk worm, we have built a viral gene network having 40 genes as components which play an important role in viral infections, utilizing an approach combined with genetics, the transcriptome by RNA-seq and network modeling.

Although we are still at the stage of vilification of the model, we would like to have a detailed discussion on what we are seeking in the transcriptome represented by RNA-seq and how we are dealing with it.

Reference literature
Modeling: Sato et al. (2010) PLoS Pathogens 6(7): e100101
Baculovirus reverse genetics: Ono et al. (2012) Virus Research 165(2) 197-206.