The length of a coding transcript’s tail end (3’ UTR) can affect its stability, transport and translation, with important regulatory consequences. Alternative cleavage of transcripts at the 3’ UTR (alternative polyadenylation) is a difficult to study phenomenon, often requiring specialized and relatively expensive experimental methods. As a solution to this problem, Dr. Birol’s group is building bioinformatics tools using standard transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) datasets to catalogue alternative polyadenylation in large cancer cohorts.