[The Svedberg seminar] – How to Terminate Transcription at the Right Place
January 26 @ 15:15 – 16:15 CET
Gene‑Wei Li
Associate Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
Bio
Gene‑Wei Li is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He earned a B.S. in Physics from National Tsinghua University (2004) and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University (2010), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His research focuses on how bacterial genomes encode quantitative control over protein production — exploring how cells optimize proteome composition through precise regulation of transcription, translation, and RNA processing.
How to Terminate Transcription at the Right Place
Precise transcription termination is essential for defining gene boundaries and achieving proper RNA output. I will discuss two recent advances regarding transcription termination in bacteria. First, we re-defined the features required for intrinsic terminators: in addition to the canonical hairpin and U-tract, two conserved sequence motifs are also necessary. This new definition quantitatively explains variations in termination efficiency and accurately pinpoints functional terminators genome-wide. Second, we showed that many bacteria have evolved purine-rich genes to avoid premature transcription termination, especially in species with “runaway transcription,” i.e., those uncoupled transcription-translation. This bias imposes strong evolutionary constraints on codon usage and the assimilation of foreign genes. Together, these principles illuminate the design principles of bacterial gene sequences and how genomes encode the correct endpoints of transcription
Host: Johan Elf johan.elf@icm.uu.se UU
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