UC San Diego Undergraduate Library Research Prize

Honorable Mention 2024 Data & GIS Category, nominated by Weg M. Ongkeko (Department of Surgery).

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is a common cancer in which the role of transf RNA derived fragments (tRFs), a relatively novel class of small non-coding RNA, has yet be widely explored. It has been proposed that tRFs influence cancer proliferation by binding to mRNA transcripts and inducing their degradation through the recruitment of cleaving proteins. This study aims to characterize the expression of tRFs, oncogenes, a tumor suppressor genes in PTC with respect to the following subtypes: classical PTC, follicular variant PTC, and tall cell PTC. Across all cohorts, we found that tRFs are significantly dysregulated (p<0.05), and that their expression is anticorrelated with dysregulated oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Binding affinity analysis further revealed that significant pairs of anticorrelated tRFs and genes have sufficient complementarity to form heteroduplexes, supporting the hypothesis that tRFs are mechanistically relevant to cancer and contribute to post-transcriptional regulation.