 I'd like to introduce Rina Satantano from the College of Medicine, Biology and the Environment. The title of Rina's presentation tonight is Mending a Broken Heart, a big role for small RNAs. By the time I finish this limited presentation, about 90 people around the world will have died from heart disease. That could be some stranger you don't know, but what if it was your neighbour or your friend or your favourite uncle? In fact, take a look at the two people sitting on either side of you. One of the three of you will die from heart disease, although hopefully not in the next three minutes. This is a problem that is costing Australia that is your harder-to-tax money, 14 billion dollars a year. Most of the currently available drugs treat only the symptoms of heart disease. However, one potential future therapy called microRNA therapy may just solve the crux of the problem. MicroRNAs are these tiny little regulatory molecules in your cells. Let's imagine that the cell is a restaurant. The DNA is the big recipe book for all of your amazing food. The food are like the messenger RNAs. The microRNAs are like the waitresses that can regulate how much food needs to be served. But let's say there's a financial crisis and the restaurant decides to fire all of these amazing microRNA waitresses and instead employ all these incompetent people. Did I just wrong for the job? Has anyone been to a restaurant where the waitresses are just completely hopeless? You wait and you wait and you wait, but you will never get that succulent chicken burger you've been craving for all day and you over there somehow ended up with five massive bowls of seafood pasta that you didn't even order. Oh, and you're allergic to seafood. Help! Everything is just complete chaos. That is the mayhem that your heart cells are in when the microRNAs are deregulated. It has been shown in my set simply changing just one single microRNA can prevent and even reverse heart disease. However, at this very new era of microRNA therapy, we just don't know enough about microRNA regulation in the heart. So my project aims to better understand specifically which microRNA and messenger RNAs are present during heart disease and how they're interacting with each other. To do this, we induced heart disease in mice and then we looked at the sequences of the RNAs taken from the heart. We found that not only are the microRNAs very diverse in the heart, but the messenger RNAs are also changing during heart disease. Going back to the restaurant, this is as if the chef decided to put fried chicken instead of grilled chicken in those chicken burgers so the microRNA waitresses think that it's a mistake and just throws it out. That, sir, is possibly why you never got that succulent chicken burger you've been craving for much in the same way that the salad never gets that really vital messenger RNA that it desperately needs to survive. This research may contribute to the development of a more specific and efficient microRNA therapy. So hopefully in the future, when you look through the two people sitting on other sides of you, you won't have to wonder whether you will be the one of the three to die from heart disease. Thank you.