scholarly journals Co-transcriptional loading of RNA export factors shapes the human transcriptome

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Viphakone ◽  
Ian M Sudbery ◽  
Catherine G. Heath ◽  
David Sims ◽  
Stuart A. Wilson

ABSTRACTDuring gene expression, RNA export factors are mainly known for driving nucleocytoplasmic transport. Whilst early studies suggested that the Exon Junction Complex provides a binding platform for them, subsequent work proposed that they are only recruited by the Cap-Binding Complex to the 5’ end of RNAs, as part of TREX. Using iCLIP, we show that the export receptor Nxf1 and two TREX subunits, Alyref and Chtop, are actually recruited to the whole mRNA co-transcriptionally via splicing but before 3’-end processing. Consequently, Alyref alters splicing decisions and Chtop regulates alternative polyadenylation. Alyref is recruited to the 5’-end of RNAs by CBC and our data reveal subsequent binding to RNAs near EJCs. We demonstrate eIF4A3 stimulates Alyref deposition not only on spliced RNAs close to EJC sites, but also single exon transcripts. Our study reveals mechanistic insights into the co-transcriptional recruitment of mRNA export factors and how this shapes the human transcriptome.

2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 8996-9008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Herold ◽  
Mikita Suyama ◽  
João P. Rodrigues ◽  
Isabelle C. Braun ◽  
Ulrike Kutay ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Vertebrate TAP (also called NXF1) and its yeast orthologue, Mex67p, have been implicated in the export of mRNAs from the nucleus. The TAP protein includes a noncanonical RNP-type RNA binding domain, four leucine-rich repeats, an NTF2-like domain that allows heterodimerization with p15 (also called NXT1), and a ubiquitin-associated domain that mediates the interaction with nucleoporins. Here we show that TAP belongs to an evolutionarily conserved family of proteins that has more than one member in higher eukaryotes. Not only the overall domain organization but also residues important for p15 and nucleoporin interaction are conserved in most family members. We characterize two of four human TAP homologues and show that one of them, NXF2, binds RNA, localizes to the nuclear envelope, and exhibits RNA export activity. NXF3, which does not bind RNA or localize to the nuclear rim, has no RNA export activity. Database searches revealed that although only one p15(nxt) gene is present in the Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans genomes, there is at least one additional p15 homologue (p15-2 [also called NXT2]) encoded by the human genome. Both human p15 homologues bind TAP, NXF2, and NXF3. Together, our results indicate that the TAP-p15 mRNA export pathway has diversified in higher eukaryotes compared to yeast, perhaps reflecting a greater substrate complexity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (24) ◽  
pp. 9533-9543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-Hai Dong ◽  
Xiangyang Hu ◽  
Weiping Tang ◽  
Xianwu Zheng ◽  
Yong Sig Kim ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT To study the genetic control of plant responses to cold stress, Arabidopsis thaliana mutants were isolated by a screen for mutations that impair cold-induced transcription of the CBF3-LUC reporter gene. We report here the characterization and cloning of a mutated gene, atnup160-1, which causes reduced CBF3-LUC induction under cold stress. atnup160-1 mutant plants display altered cold-responsive gene expression and are sensitive to chilling stress and defective in acquired freezing tolerance. AtNUP160 was isolated through positional cloning and shown to encode a putative homolog of the animal nucleoporin Nup160. In addition to the impaired expression of CBF genes, microarray analysis revealed that a number of other genes important for plant cold tolerance were also affected in the mutants. The atnup160 mutants flower early and show retarded seedling growth, especially at low temperatures. AtNUP160 protein is localized at the nuclear rim, and poly(A)-mRNA in situ hybridization shows that mRNA export is defective in the atnup160-1 mutant plants. Our study suggests that Arabidopsis AtNUP160 is critical for the nucleocytoplasmic transport of mRNAs and that it plays important roles in plant growth and flowering time regulation and is required for cold stress tolerance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-323.e8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Viphakone ◽  
Ian Sudbery ◽  
Llywelyn Griffith ◽  
Catherine G. Heath ◽  
David Sims ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin van der Graaf ◽  
Helen White-Cooper

AbstractThe RNA export pathway is essential for export-competent mRNAs to pass from the nucleus into the cytoplasm, and thus is essential for protein production and normal function of cells. Drosophila with partial loss of function of Nxt1, a core factor in the pathway, show reduced viability and male and female sterility. The male sterility has previously been shown to be caused by defects in testis-specific gene expression, particularly of genes without introns. Here we describe a specific defect in growth and maintenance of the larval muscles, leading to muscle degeneration in Nxt1 mutants. RNAseq revealed reduced expression of mRNAs of many genes in Nxt1 mutant muscles. Despite this, the degeneration was rescued by increased expression of a single gene, the costamere component tn (abba), in muscles. Genes under-expressed in the mutant typically have long introns, and most normally encode circular RNAs in addition to mRNAs. This is the first report of a specific role for the RNA export pathway gene Nxt1 in muscle integrity. Our data on Nxt1 links the mRNA export pathway to a global role in mRNA expression of genes that also produce circular RNAs, in vivo.Author summaryIn eukaryotic cells the DNA encoding instructions for protein synthesis is located in the nucleus, it is transcribed to generate pre-mRNA, which is processed at both ends and spliced to remove internal spacer regions (introns) to generate mRNA. This mRNA is then transported by the mRNA export pathway via nuclear pores to the cytoplasm for protein synthesis. We have previously shown that reduction in activity of a specific protein in the mRNA export pathway, Nxt1, has an additional role in testis-specific transcription. Here we describe a further role for this protein specifically in gene expression, particularly of genes with long introns, and in muscle maintenance. Drosophila larvae with reduced Nxt1 activity have normal muscle pattern when they are small, but show muscular atrophy and degeneration as they grow, resulting in significant defects in their movement speed. We discovered that expression of many genes is reduced in the mutant larvae, but that restoring the expression of just one of these, abba, the Drosophila homologue of Trim32 (a human gene involved in muscular dystrophy) is capable of preventing the muscle degeneration.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin van der Graaf ◽  
Katia Jindrich ◽  
Robert Mitchell ◽  
Helen White-Cooper

Abstract The mRNA export pathway is responsible for the transport of mRNAs from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, and thus is essential for protein production and normal cellular functions. A partial loss of function allele of the mRNA export factor Nxt1 in Drosophila shows reduced viability and sterility. A previous study has shown that the male fertility defect is due to a defect in transcription and RNA stability, indicating the potential for this pathway to be implicated in processes beyond the known mRNA transport function. Here we investigate the reduced viability of Nxt1 partial loss of function mutants, and describe a defect in growth and maintenance of the larval muscles, leading to muscle degeneration. RNA-seq revealed reduced expression of a set of mRNAs, particularly from genes with long introns in Nxt1 mutant carcass. We detected differential expression of circRNA, and significantly fewer distinct circRNAs expressed in the mutants. Despite the widespread defects in gene expression, muscle degeneration was rescued by increased expression of the costamere component tn (abba) in muscles. This is the first report of a role for the RNA export pathway gene Nxt1 in the maintenance of muscle integrity. Our data also links the mRNA export pathway to a specific role in the expression of mRNA and circRNA from common precursor genes, in vivo.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 5322
Author(s):  
Nitika Kandhari ◽  
Calvin A. Kraupner-Taylor ◽  
Paul F. Harrison ◽  
David R. Powell ◽  
Traude H. Beilharz

Alternative transcript cleavage and polyadenylation is linked to cancer cell transformation, proliferation and outcome. This has led researchers to develop methods to detect and bioinformatically analyse alternative polyadenylation as potential cancer biomarkers. If incorporated into standard prognostic measures such as gene expression and clinical parameters, these could advance cancer prognostic testing and possibly guide therapy. In this review, we focus on the existing methodologies, both experimental and computational, that have been applied to support the use of alternative polyadenylation as cancer biomarkers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Azevedo ◽  
Giovanna Maria Dimitri ◽  
Pietro Lió ◽  
Eric R. Gamazon

AbstractHere, we performed a comprehensive intra-tissue and inter-tissue multilayer network analysis of the human transcriptome. We generated an atlas of communities in gene co-expression networks in 49 tissues (GTEx v8), evaluated their tissue specificity, and investigated their methodological implications. UMAP embeddings of gene expression from the communities (representing nearly 18% of all genes) robustly identified biologically-meaningful clusters. Notably, new gene expression data can be embedded into our algorithmically derived models to accelerate discoveries in high-dimensional molecular datasets and downstream diagnostic or prognostic applications. We demonstrate the generalisability of our approach through systematic testing in external genomic and transcriptomic datasets. Methodologically, prioritisation of the communities in a transcriptome-wide association study of the biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP) in 361,194 individuals in the UK Biobank identified genetically-determined expression changes associated with CRP and led to considerably improved performance. Furthermore, a deep learning framework applied to the communities in nearly 11,000 tumors profiled by The Cancer Genome Atlas across 33 different cancer types learned biologically-meaningful latent spaces, representing metastasis (p < 2.2 × 10−16) and stemness (p < 2.2 × 10−16). Our study provides a rich genomic resource to catalyse research into inter-tissue regulatory mechanisms, and their downstream consequences on human disease.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Olufemi Fasina

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Viruses as obligate intracellular metabolic parasite require the capacity to orchestrate and modulate the host environment either in the nucleus or cytoplasm for their efficient reproductive life cycle. This warrants the use of diverse range of proteins expressed from the viral genome with the ability of regulating viral genome replication, transcription and translation, in addition antagonizing host factors inhibitory to the virus. Therefore, in order to achieve these goals, viruses utilizes gene expression strategies to expand their coding capacity. Gene expression mechanism such as transcription initiation, capping, splicing and 3�-end processing afford viruses the opportunities to utilize the eukaryotic metabolic machineries for generating proteome diversity. Parvoviruses and other DNA viruses effectively capitalize on their use of nuclear eukaryotic metabolic machineries to co-opt host cell factors for optimal replication and gene expression. Parvoviruses with small genome size and overlapping open reading frames utilize alternative transcription initiation, alternative splicing and alternative polyadenylation to co-ordinate the expression of its non-structural and structural proteins. In this work, we have characterized how two parvoviruses; Dependovirus AAV5 and Bocavirus Minute virus of canine (MVC) utilize alternative gene expression mechanisms and strategies to optimize expression of viral proteins from their genome.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (Supplement_3) ◽  
pp. iii63-iii63
Author(s):  
J W Robinson ◽  
J Zheng ◽  
S Tscavachidis ◽  
A E Howell ◽  
C L Relton ◽  
...  

Abstract BACKGROUND The drug treatment regimen for glioma has remained relatively static since the introduction of temozolomide, although new drugs and drug combinations are being trialled. The human transcriptome can provide promising insights into causal genes as potential drug interventions for glioma treatment and may guide drug discovery methods. MATERIAL AND METHODS We apply two sample Mendelian randomisation and colocalisation to explore the influence of genetically-predicted gene expression across 12 tissue types located in the brain (4,554 genes from GTEx) and whole blood (16,112 genes from eQTLGen) on glioma risk (5,739 cases, 5,501 controls from a meta-analysis of GICC and MDA glioma GWAS). We used the MR-Base R package to conduct these analyses. RESULTS We identify 9 genes whose genetically-predicted expression was strongly associated with glioma risk. Of these genes, 7/9 are shown to have tissue-specific expression while the other two genes showed an association with glioma across multiple brain tissues and whole blood. For example, JAK1, involved in the well-known JAK-STAT pathway, is found in the frontal cortex (OR=1.49 for glioma per standard deviation increase in gene expression; 95% CI: 1.28 to 1.73; P=1.79 × 10−7), the cerebellar hemisphere (OR=1.32; 95% CI: 1.19 to 1.47; P=2.64 × 10−7), the cerebellum (OR=1.27; 95% CI: 1.16 to 1.39; P=2.64 × 10−7) and the cortex (OR=1.38; 95% CI: 1.22 to 1.57; P=2.64 × 10−7). This pathway has been highlighted in previous research as a potential intervention target for glioma therapies. We found that 5/9 of the genes from the MR analysis are expressed in the cerebellum. However malignant cerebellar glioma is a rare tumour (~3% of all malignant gliomas). This suggests that tumourigenesis elsewhere in the brain may be affected by other tissue-specific genes, specifically in the cerebellum, though this will require further research to elucidate. We further triangulate the MR findings with evidence from the OpenTargets platform to strengthen the putative causal associations. OpenTargets aims to “generate evidence on the validity of therapeutic targets based on genome-scale experiments and analysis”. For example, JAK1 receives an overall OpenTargets score of 0.89 out of 1, with most of the evidence for this JAK1-glioma association coming from affected pathways data. CONCLUSION This study has combined genetic epidemiological approaches to the analysis of the human transcriptome on glioma incidence. We provide evidence that these genes may inform putative drug targets for tertiary treatment of glioma. Future research specifically towards this aim will be required to fully elucidate intervention targets.


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