EpiSignal Talk of Prof. Dr. Caroline Friedel

On December 4, 2025, Prof. Stefan Legewie invited Prof. Dr. Caroline Friedel, associate professor for Bioinformatics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (LMU) since 2015 and speaker of the joint interest group Bioinformatics (FaBI) of the GI, DECHEMA, GBM, GDCh, GMDS andV AAM. With her talk “Decoding the 3′ End: Integrative Transcriptomics of Aberrant and Alternative Transcription Termination” she introduced us to her field of research, which largely focuses on developing methods for the integrative analysis of multi-omics data, with a particular focus on splicing, transcription termination and virus infections. HSV-1 infection leads to genome-wide disruption of transcription termination but also increased use of internal poly(A) sites within genes similar to what is observed upon inhibition of splicing. To disentangle disrupted, premature and alternative transcription termination requires precise determination of poly(A) site locations before and during infection or splicing inhibition combined with transcriptomics of nascent transcription. In this talk, she presented methods they developed for integrative analysis of these data as well as results from their studies on HSV-1 transcription termination and CDK11 inhibition, which inhibits splicing genome-wide. In this way, they showed that premature and disrupted transcription termination in HSV-1 infection depends on only partially overlapping pathways and distinct functions of viral proteins.