PhD defense : Study of circular code motifs in nucleic acid sequences

PhD defense : Karim EL SOUFI

Team : CSTB

Title : Study of circular code motifs in nucleic acid sequences

Abstract : The work done in this thesis presents a new direction for circular code identified in 1996 by analysing the motifs constructed from circular code. These particular motifs are called circular code motifs. We applied search algorithms to locate circular code motifs in nucleic acid sequences in order to find biological significance. In fact, the circular code X, which was found in gene sequences, is a set of trinucleotides that have the property of reading frame retrieval, synchronization and maintenance. We started our study in the ribosomal decoding centre (rRNA), an important region involved in the process of translating genes into proteins. Afterwards, we expanded our scope to study the interaction of rRNA with tRNA through the X circular code. Finally, we search for X circular code motifs in the complete DNA sequences of chromosomes of the eukaryotic genomes. This study introduced new properties to the circular code theory.

This thesis was supervised by Christian Michel of the University of Strasbourg.

The thesis will be held in English on Tuesday, 24th of January starting 1:30pm, room A207 of the pole API building in Illkirch.