RNA Salon #2

Thursday 11 Dec 2025, 15:00 → 17:30 Europe/Ljubljana

Great Lecture Hall (National Institute of Chemistry)

For the second meeting of the Ljubljana RNA Salon in 2025/2026, we will have a invited lecture given by Dr. Marcus Jahnel from TU Dresden, Germany. This will be followed by a pre-Christmas gathering.

The RNA Salon will take place at the National Institute of Chemistry.

15:00 → 16:00 Invited lecture

15:00 Cold RNA under tension: folding and misfolding in the age of condensates

Earth, 715 million years ago. The Cryogenian begins. Four ice ages, Sturtian, Marinoan, Gaskiers, and Baykonur, repeatedly freeze the planet for eons. Closed ice sheets cover oceans and continents. The cold is unbearable. Life is almost wiped out. Proteins that mitigate cold stress, particularly RNA chaperones of the cold shock family, are under extreme and prolonged evolutionary pressure. Surprisingly, once the severe cold stress disappeared, a dramatic expansion of animal life on Earth began. A coincidence?

Our lab has traced the evolution of cold-shock proteins, RNA-binding proteins that still help protists fight the cold, but were later co-opted by mammals to help build their brains during embryonic development. Intriguingly, this protein family shows a gradual expansion of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) that scales with organismal complexity, allowing the study of the emergence of collective molecular behavior. We found that the presence of flanking IDRs not only conferred the ability to form condensates but also fine-tunes the binding affinity to a target RNA. High-resolution single-molecule experiments with targeted long-noncoding RNAs such as HOTAIR further elucidate the influence of IDR-mediated protein-protein interactions on the folding process of complex regulatory RNAs. These observations led us to propose a droplet-assisted folding mechanism for long and complex RNAs [1]. Our model system illustrates how RNA-protein condensates may have emerged in response to prolonged stress and evolved to provide organisms with an opportunity for recovery and growth.

[1] Doll & Pekarek et al., Droplet-assisted folding of long regulatory RNAs, bioRxiv, 2025

Speaker: Dr Marcus Jahnel (Excellence Cluster Physics of Life and the BIOTEC at TU Dresden, Germany)

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16:00 → 17:30 xmasRNA

Pre-Christmas gathering over drinks