Modelling global mRNA dynamics during Drosophila embryogenesis reveals a relationship between mRNA degradation and P-bodies

Regulation of mRNA degradation is critical for a diverse array of cellular processes and developmental cell fate decisions. Although many methods for determining mRNA half-lives rely on transcriptional inhibition or metabolic labelling, these manipulations can influence half-lives or introduce errors in the measurements. Here we use a non-invasive method for estimating mRNA half-lives globally in the early Drosophila embryo using a total RNA-seq time series and Gaussian process regression to model the dynamics of premature and mature mRNAs.