New paper out co-authored by Jurgen

Jurgen co-authored a paper in BMC genomics that uses mathematical modelling to understand the gene expression cascade in Trypanosoma brucei. You can read it here.

The current analysis is a follow-up of two previous publications from Jurgen that describe the contruction of a model of the gene expression cascade in T. brucei (Haanstra et al., 2008) and the extension of this model to the entire genome (Fadda et al., 2014). Here, using genome-scale quantitative data on various levels of the gene expression cascade, we compared model-simulated mRNA abundances to the actual in vivo mRNA abundances on a per-gene basis.

This analyses revealed that levels of mRNAs in procyclic form trypanosomes (the life-stage inside the tsetse fly) are determined mainly by transcript length and mRNA decay, with some control of precursor processing. In bloodstream forms (when the parasite lives in the mammalian bloodstream) variations in nuclear events play a larger role in transcriptome regulation, suggesting aquisition of new control mechanisms during adaptation to mammalian parasitism.