A PhD within the European MSCA DN network LongTREC: how the next generation of RNA sequencing helps us study plants under stress

LongTREC (Long-reads Transcriptome European Consortium) is a European doctoral network under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme, in which 12 doctoral students at leading European laboratories (including ours at NIB) are trained to work with the newest single-molecule RNA sequencing technologies. Instead of short fragments, these technologies allow us to read full-length transcripts/mRNAs (holding the records for individual proteins), greatly improving our understanding of which transcripts a cell actually produces and how this changes over time and under stress. At the National Institute of Biology I supervise a PhD student, who applies these approaches to research on plant responses to abiotic stress. I will present the work on this project from the lab bench through to the computational analysis results, and the advantages that this kind of international collaboration brings.