BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.2//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:67@escience.washington.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240125T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240125T172000 DTSTAMP:20240117T174749Z URL:https://escience.washington.edu/events/uwdss-gorjifard/ SUMMARY:UW Data Science Seminar: Sayeh Gorjifard DESCRIPTION:\n\nPlease join us for a UW Data Science Seminar on Thursday\, January 25th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PST. The seminar will feature Sayeh Go rjifard\, a postdoctoral scholar with UW Genome Sciences.\n\nThe seminar w ill be held in the Electrical &\; Computer Engineering Building (ECE)\, Room 105\n\n\n \;\n"Decoding Terminators: Synthetic terminator design s enabled by a comprehensive analysis of plant terminators"\nAbstract: The 3’ end of a gene\, often called a terminator\, modulates mRNA stability \, localization\, translation\, and polyadenylation. Here\, we adapted Pla nt STARR-seq\, a massively parallel reporter assay\, to measure the activi ty of over 50\,000 terminators from the plants Arabidopsis thaliana and  Zea mays. We characterize thousands of plant terminators\, including man y that outperform bacterial terminators commonly used in plants. Terminato r activity is species-specific\, differing in tobacco leaf and maize proto plast assays. While recapitulating known biology\, our results reveal the relative contributions of polyadenylation motifs to terminator strength. W e built a robust computational model to predict terminator strength and us ed it to conduct in silico evolution that generated optimized synthetic terminators. Additionally\, we discover alternative polyadenylation sites across tens of thousands of terminators\; however\, the strongest terminat ors tend to have a dominant cleavage site. Our results establish features of plant terminator function and identify strong naturally occurring and s ynthetic terminators.\nBio: Sayeh Gorjifard joined the Genome Sciences Dep artment at the University of Washington as a graduate student in 2018. She graduated in the fall of 2023 and has since continued as a one-year postd octoral scholar to conclude ongoing research. Sayeh received her undergrad uate degrees in Chemistry and Art from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire\ , where she focused on manganese-catalyzed reactions to 2-cyanoindoles. Fo llowing her undergraduate studies\, she researched as a CRTA fellow at the National Cancer Institute\, studying the effect of the gut microbiome on the response to cancer therapy. Subsequently\, she earned her Master's deg ree in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University as a Molecular Target a nd Drug Discovery Fellow. During her master's program\, she played a role in developing a pharmacogenomic pipeline to predict the most effective dru g combinations for Multiple Myeloma patients. Sayeh's journey continued a t the UW Genome Sciences for her Ph.D.\, where she studied CRISPR technolo gy development and plant regulatory grammar.\nThe UW Data Science Seminar  is an annual lecture series at the University of Washington that hosts s cholars working across applied areas of data science\, such as the science s\, engineering\, humanities and arts along with methodological areas in d ata science\, such as computer science\, applied math and statistics. Our presenters come from all domain fields and include occasional external spe akers from regional partners\, governmental agencies and industry.\nThe 20 23-2024 seminars will be held in person\, and are free and open to the pub lic. LOCATION:Electrical and Computer Engineering Building\, Room 105\, 185 W St evens Way NE\, Seattle\, WA\, 98195\, United States X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=185 W Stevens Way NE\, Seat tle\, WA\, 98195\, United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=Electrical and Computer Engineering Building\, Room 105:geo:0,0 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231105T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR