日本RNA学会

This year the meeting of the RNA Society is held in Kyoto, a charming and time-honored city with the epitome of Japan culture. For me, a foreign student studying in Hokkaido, this is the first time to visit Kyoto. Kyoto is a totally different place, more ancient, more crowed, and quite hot. And what impress me most are the wide and diverse temples around Kyoto, the unique markers of the city.

Back to the conference, annual RNA meeting is the grandest feast for RNA researches all over the world, and the scale of it, we can infer from the number of presenters this year: 877 in total, 171 oral and 706 poster. I’m so excited to be a member of it and the meeting really lets me understand the glamour of RNA world.

This year, the meeting mainly focuses on noncoding RNA related to diseases, the recent clarified splicing mechanism, as well as regulation of transcription and translation. Among them, owing to the rapid development of methods for RNA detecting and analysis, numerous novel ncRNA are discovered to be related to the specific process in the cell thus the diseases. For example, the combined method of UV-crosslinking, ligation and sequencing of hybrids (CLASH), that derived and improved from the method CLIP, enables identifying the in vivo RNA-RNA interaction in the regulation of gene expression and is extensively applied in ncRNA research. The rapid development of RNA field is also shown in CRISPR-cas system. While in the meeting of RNA society Japan 2015 that the molecular basis determination of CRISPR-cas was a hot field, this year the topic changed to extensively use of CRISPR-cas system as a common means for mutagenesis. Only this is enough to convince us the great potential of RNA research nowadays and in the long future.

I am currently doing research on the amino-acyl tRNA synthetase by structural biology, actually more like protein researcher; the multifarious roles of RNA really make me curious and excited, and also the methods for RNA research raise my interests. Thus, in the future study, I am looking forward to combine them into my current field to be more systematic and integral, that is, not only focus on revealing the mysteries by structural biology, but also trace back to first find something novel to be characterized related to the cellular processes and diseases by biochemistry.

During the meeting, I had great chances to discuss with scientists in either same or different fields. Prof. Yokoyama, an authority in the field of amino-acyl tRNA synthetase, gave me lots of advice for my research and expanded my sight in this field. Moreover, discussion with Prof. Kanai and Dr. Josephine was really a wonderful time. Also, the companions in this conference, Dr. Nakamura, Dr. Sokabe, Dr. Kenichi, and Dr. Mukai shared many experience and ideas in the research and also in finding postdocs position, which does me a great favor. Thank all of them that enrich my first big trip in RNA!

Finally, I would like to thank the registration fee support from RNA 2016.

See you RNA 2017！

Photo 1. Main Hall of RNA2016