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In search of beneficial coding RNA editing.

ABSTRACT: RNA editing is a posttranscriptional modification that can lead to a change in the encoded protein sequence of a gene. Although a few cases of mammalian coding RNA editing are known to be functionally important, the vast majority of over 2,000 A-to-I editing sites that have been identified from the coding regions of the human genome are likely nonadaptive, representing tolerable promiscuous targeting of editing enzymes. Finding the potentially tiny fraction of beneficial editing sites from the sea of mostly nearly neutral editing is a difficult but important task. Here, we propose and provide evidence that evolutionarily conserved or "hardwired" residues that experience high-level nonsynonymous RNA editing in a species are enriched with beneficial editing. This simple approach allows the prediction of sites where RNA editing is functionally important. We suggest that priority be given to these candidates in future characterizations of the functional and fitness consequences of RNA editing.

SUBMITTER: Xu G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4298174 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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In search of beneficial coding RNA editing.

Xu Guixia G Zhang Jianzhi J

Molecular biology and evolution 20141112 2

RNA editing is a posttranscriptional modification that can lead to a change in the encoded protein sequence of a gene. Although a few cases of mammalian coding RNA editing are known to be functionally important, the vast majority of over 2,000 A-to-I editing sites that have been identified from the coding regions of the human genome are likely nonadaptive, representing tolerable promiscuous targeting of editing enzymes. Finding the potentially tiny fraction of beneficial editing sites from the s ...[more]

PMID: 25392343

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Project description:MotivationSearching genomes for non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) by their secondary structure has become an important goal for bioinformatics. For pseudoknot-free structures, ncRNA search can be effective based on the covariance model and CYK-type dynamic programming. However, the computational difficulty in aligning an RNA sequence to a pseudoknot has prohibited fast and accurate search of arbitrary RNA structures. Our previous work introduced a graph model for RNA pseudoknots and proposed to solve the structure-sequence alignment by graph optimization. Given k candidate regions in the target sequence for each of the n stems in the structure, we could compute a best alignment in time O(k(t)n) based upon a tree width t decomposition of the structure graph. However, to implement this method to programs that can routinely perform fast yet accurate RNA pseudoknot searches, we need novel heuristics to ensure that, without degrading the accuracy, only a small number of stem candidates need to be examined and a tree decomposition of a small tree width can always be found for the structure graph.ResultsThe current work builds on the previous one with newly developed preprocessing algorithms to reduce the values for parameters k and t and to implement the search method into a practical program, called RNATOPS, for RNA pseudoknot search. In particular, we introduce techniques, based on probabilistic profiling and distance penalty functions, which can identify for every stem just a small number k (e.g. k <or= 10) of plausible regions in the target sequence to which the stem needs to align. We also devised a specialized tree decomposition algorithm that can yield tree decomposition of small tree width t (e.g. t <or= 4) for almost all RNA structure graphs. Our experiments show that with RNATOPS it is possible to routinely search prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes for specific RNA structures of medium to large sizes, including pseudoknots, with high sensitivity and high specificity, and in a reasonable amount of time.

Project description:Background. RNA editing is a post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism that can alter the coding sequences of certain genes in response to physiological demands. We previously identified C-to-U RNA editing (C136U, R46X) which inactivates a small fraction of succinate dehydrogenase (SDH; mitochondrial complex II) subunit B gene (SDHB) mRNAs in normal steady-state peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). SDH is a heterotetrameric tumor suppressor complex which when mutated causes paraganglioma tumors that are characterized by constitutive activation of hypoxia inducible pathways. Here, we studied regulation, extent and cell type origin of SDHB RNA editing. Methods. We used short-term cultured PBMCs obtained from random healthy platelet donors, performed monocyte enrichment by cold aggregation, employed a novel allele-specific quantitative PCR method, flow cytometry, immunologic cell separation, gene expression microarray, database analysis and high-throughput RNA sequencing. Results. While the editing rate is low in uncultured monocyte-enriched PBMCs (average rate 2.0%, range 0.4%-6.3%, n = 42), it is markedly upregulated upon exposure to 1% oxygen tension (average rate 18.2%, range 2.8%-49.4%, n = 14) and during normoxic macrophage differentiation in the presence of serum (average rate 10.1%, range 2.7%-18.8%, n = 17). The normoxic induction of SDHB RNA editing was associated with the development of dense adherent aggregates of monocytes in culture. CD14-positive monocyte isolation increased the percentages of C136U transcripts by 1.25-fold in normoxic cultures (n = 5) and 1.68-fold in hypoxic cultures (n = 4). CD14-negative lymphocytes showed no evidence of SDHB editing. The SDHB genomic DNA remained wild-type during increased RNA editing. Microarray analysis showed expression changes in wound healing and immune response pathway genes as the editing rate increased in normoxic cultures. High-throughput sequencing of SDHB and SDHD transcripts confirmed the induction of C136U RNA editing in normoxic cultures but showed no additional verifiable coding edits. Analysis of SDHB RNA sequence data from 16 normal human tissues from the Illumina Body Map and from 45 samples representing 23 different cell types from the ENCODE projects confirmed the occurrence of site-specific C136U editing in whole blood (1.7%) and two primary CD14+ monocyte samples (1.9% and 2.6%). In contrast, the other cell types showed an average of 0.2% and 0.1% C136U editing rates in the two databases, respectively. Conclusions. These findings demonstrate that C-to-U coding RNA editing of certain genes is dynamically induced by physiologically relevant environmental factors and suggest that epigenetic downregulation of SDHB by site-specific RNA editing plays a role in hypoxia adaptation in monocytes.

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In search of beneficial coding RNA editing.

Publications

In search of beneficial coding RNA editing.

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