Outbound mobility to City of Hope's Beckman Research Institute for two postdoctoral scholars who will do research on non-protein-coding RNA.

The proposal describes outbound mobility of two postdoctoral scholars and their families to City of Hope's Beckman Research Institute (Duarte, CA). The researchers are still partially employed by Interagon AS, where they have conducted their doctoral rese arch, but will now also be employed as postdoctral fellows at NTNU. They both have extensive experience with algorithms that mine for complex patterns in large volumes of data. Their research has found important applications in the analysis of regulatory RNA with putative roles in gene silencing, and the algorithms have been used in collaborative research with leading national and international research organizations, including universities and biotechnology companies. The postdoctoral scholars's main ob jective is threefold, namely to 1. Establish relationships with internationally acknowledged professors and institutions that will be strategically important both academically and commercially; 2. Increase the quality of their research to enable publica tion in the highest ranked international scientific journals; and 3. Establish a new research group at NTNU once the postdoctoral stay at City of Hope is over. (Note that the hospital environment of City of Hope is similar to that at NTNU's St. Olav's Ho spital.) Internationally acknowledged laboratories combine computational and biochemical approaches to advance biomedical research. The postdoctoral scholars will develop algorithms for analysis of non-protein-coding RNA with regulatory properties. These processes have gone unnoticed until relatively recently, but recent progress has spurred an enormous interest for these RNA molecules. It is anticipated that research in this area will have important consequences for our understanding of onset and prog ression of many diseases, and any results will be scrutinized with respect to their potential for improved functional genomics tools and new diagnostic or therapeutic approaches.