Annotating Low Abundance and Transient RNAs in Yeast using Tiling Microarrays
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ABSTRACT: A complete description of the transcriptome of an organism is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of how it functions, how its transcriptional networks are controlled, and my provide insights into the organism's evolution. Despite the status of Saccharomyces cerevisiae as arguably the most well understood model eukaryote, we still do not have a full catalog and understanding of all its genes. In order to interrogate the transcriptome of S. cerevisiae for low abundance or rapidly turned over transcripts, we deleted elements of the RNA degradation machinery with the aim of increasing the relative abundance of such transcripts. We then used high-resolution tiling microarrays and ultra high-throughput sequencing (UHTS) to identify and map the locations of unannotated transcripts that are more abundant in the RNA degradation mutants relative to wild-type cells, revealing 540 currently unannotated, presumably low abundance or short-lived RNAs, of which 231 are previously unknown and unique to this study. It is likely that many of these represent cryptic unstable transcripts (CUTs) which are rapidly degraded and whose function(s) within the cell are still unclear, while others may represent novel functional transcripts. Of the 271 transcripts we identified in current intergenic regions, greater than 90 percent have lower conservation scores amongst closely related yeast species than 95 percent of the verified ORFs in S. cerevisiae; such regions of the genome have typically been less well studied, and by definition encode transcripts that distinguish S. cerevisiae from these closely related species. Keywords: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, transcriptome, salt shock, xrn1, rrp6, lsm1, pat1, RNA degradation
ORGANISM(S): Saccharomyces cerevisiae
PROVIDER: GSE11800 | GEO | 2008/12/18
SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA109081
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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