Blog Post

Originally from Ottawa, Dr. Choquet did her undergraduate degree in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the Université de Montréal and her Ph.D. in Human Genetics in the labs of Bernard Brais and Claudia Kleinman at McGill University. Her main project, which focused on a disorder caused by mutations in subunits of RNA polymerase III, led her to develop a keen interest in RNA processing and its link to human diseases. For her post-doctoral fellowship, she joined Dr. Stirling Churchman’s lab at Harvard University, where she developed methods based on nanopore sequencing to analyze RNAs at all stages of their life cycle, with a focus on how pre-mRNA splicing is coordinated across multi-intronic transcripts. She started her own group at the Université de Sherbrooke in August 2023, where she studies how pre-mRNA splicing and other RNA maturation steps are regulated across long transcripts; how distinct maturation steps influence one another; and how this is modulated in different contexts, such as during cell differentiation, in genetic diseases and during aging.

“Instead of studying each splicing reaction or RNA maturation step in a vacuum, we look at the full picture: how they all are connected and influence one another”.  Dr. Choquet says their main tool is direct RNA nanopore sequencing: an awesome technology that gives beautiful data allowing to simultaneously analyze multiple steps of RNA maturation!  In her most recently published paper (accessible here), they used direct RNA nanopore sequencing of nascent RNA to show that poly(A) tail lengths vary between different alleles, and that some genetic variants are associated with co-occurring changes in distinct RNA maturation steps, providing further evidence for coupling between them.

Dr. Choquet doesn’t get into the lab space as much as she used to, but still tries to code and analyze data as much as possible.  “One of my favorite things is the exploration and visualization of long-read sequencing data in IGV. Being able to see complete transcripts can lead to you noticing things that weren’t picked up by standard analysis software, which motivates new analyses”.  Recently, she’s also become interested in research showing that splicing accuracy decreases with aging across many tissues. Her lab has started exciting new projects to understand whether and how these splicing alterations contribute to heterogeneous aging trajectories – why some people remain healthy well into their nineties while others are affected by multiple chronic diseases despite a healthy lifestyle.

Her favourite part of her job is interacting with her students, whether it’s looking at data together or brainstorming on project directions – much more fun than administrative duties!

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Choquet’s work, her lab website can be accessed here and her LinkedIn profile is here. Thank you Karine!