Project description:Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) ORF57 is a viral RNA-binding protein essential for viral lytic gene expression. ORF57 binds to target RNA directly via interaction with cellular cofactors. To investigate the entire repertoire of ORF57-associated RNAs we performed UV cross-linking immunoprecipitatin (CLIP) experiment using an affinity-purified, highly specific anti-ORF57 antibody in KSHV-infected primariy effusion lymphoma BCBL-1 cells undegoing lytic virus replication.
Project description:CLIP-seq is widely used to study genome-wide interactions between RNA-binding proteins and RNAs. However, there are few tools available to analyze CLIP-seq data, thus creating a bottleneck to the implementation of this methodology. Here, we present PIPE-CLIP, a Galaxy framework-based comprehensive online pipeline for reliable analysis of data generated by three types of CLIP-seq protocol: HITS-CLIP, PAR-CLIP and iCLIP. PIPE-CLIP provides both data processing and statistical analysis to determine candidate cross-linking regions, which are comparable to those regions identified from the original studies or using existing computational tools. PIPE-CLIP is available at http://pipeclip.qbrc.org/.
Project description:Post-transcriptional regulation via RNA-binding proteins plays a fundamental role in every organism, but the regulatory mechanisms lack important understanding. Nevertheless, they can be elucidated by cross-linking immunoprecipitation in combination with high-throughput sequencing (CLIP-Seq). CLIP-Seq answers questions about the functional role of an RNA-binding protein and its targets by determining binding sites on a nucleotide level and associated sequence and structural binding patterns. In recent years the amount of CLIP-Seq data skyrocketed, urging the need for an automatic data analysis that can deal with different experimental set-ups. However, noncanonical data, new protocols, and a huge variety of tools, especially for peak calling, made it difficult to define a standard. CLIP-Explorer is a flexible and reproducible data analysis pipeline for iCLIP data that supports for the first time eCLIP, FLASH, and uvCLAP data. Individual steps like peak calling can be changed to adapt to different experimental settings. We validate CLIP-Explorer on eCLIP data, finding similar or nearly identical motifs for various proteins in comparison with other databases. In addition, we detect new sequence motifs for PTBP1 and U2AF2. Finally, we optimize the peak calling with 3 different peak callers on RBFOX2 data, discuss the difficulty of the peak-calling step, and give advice for different experimental set-ups. CLIP-Explorer finally fills the demand for a flexible CLIP-Seq data analysis pipeline that is applicable to the up-to-date CLIP protocols. The article further shows the limitations of current peak-calling algorithms and the importance of a robust peak detection.
Project description:Master transcription factors such as TP63 establish super-enhancers (SEs) to drive core transcriptional networks in cancer cells, yet the spatiotemporal regulation of SEs within the nucleus remains unknown. The nuclear pore complex (NPC) may tether SEs to the nuclear pore where RNA export rates are maximal. Here, we report that NUP153, a component of the NPC, anchors SEs to the NPC and enhances TP63 expression by maximizing mRNA export. This anchoring is mediated through protein-protein interaction between the intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of NUP153 and the coactivator BRD4. Silencing of NUP153 excludes SEs from the nuclear periphery, decreases TP63 expression, impairs cellular growth, and induces epidermal differentiation of squamous cell carcinoma. Overall, this work reveals the critical roles of NUP153 IDRs in the regulation of SE localization, thus providing insights into a new layer of gene regulation at the epigenomic and spatial level.
Project description:RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are at the core of post-transcriptional regulation and thus of gene expression control at the RNA level. One of the principal challenges in the field of gene expression regulation is to understand RBPs mechanism of action. As a result of recent evolution of experimental techniques, it is now possible to obtain the RNA regions recognized by RBPs on a transcriptome-wide scale. In fact, CLIP-seq protocols use the joint action of CLIP, crosslinking immunoprecipitation, and high-throughput sequencing to recover the transcriptome-wide set of interaction regions for a particular protein. Nevertheless, computational methods are necessary to process CLIP-seq experimental data and are a key to advancement in the understanding of gene regulatory mechanisms. Considering the importance of computational methods in this area, we present a review of the current status of computational approaches used and proposed for CLIP-seq data.
Project description:Nucleoporins (Nups) are a family of proteins best known as the constituent building blocks of nuclear pore complexes (NPCs), the transport channels that mediate nuclear transport. Recent evidence suggest that several Nups have additional roles in controlling the activation and silencing of developmental genes, however, the mechanistic details of these functions remain poorly understood. Here, we show that depletion of Nup153 in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) causes the de-repression of developmental genes and induction of early differentiation. This loss of pluripotency is not associated with defects in global nucleo-cytoplasmic transport activity. Instead, Nup153 binds to the transcriptional start site (TSS) of developmental genes and mediates the recruitment of the polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) to its target loci. Our results reveal a nuclear transport-independent role of Nup153 in maintaining stem cell pluripotency and introduce a role of NPC proteins in mammalian epigenetic gene silencing. RNA-seq, ChIP-Seq, and DamID-Seq for Nup153, Oct4, and key chromatin regulators in mouse ES cells and neural progenitors
Project description:Establishment of cell lineage specification, maintenance of cellular states and cellular responses to developmental cues rely on gene regulation and spatial genome organization during early development. Emerging data point to highly coordinated activity between epigenetic mechanisms that involve nuclear architecture, chromatin structure and chromatin organization. We show that the nuclear pore complex (NPC) basket protein, Nucleoporin 153 (NUP153) interacts with the nuclear architectural proteins, CTCF and cohesin, and mediates their binding across cis-regulatory elements in pluripotent mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells. NUP153 depletion results in altered occupancy of architectural proteins coupled with differential changes in transcription. This affect is most prevalent at the bivalent genes. To provide molecular insights onto NUP153-mediated gene regulation, we utilized Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF)-inducible immediate early gene (IEG) loci, which we identified as NUP153 targets. IEG transcription is regulated through a POL II pause-release mechanism. We provide evidence that NUP153 is critical for CTCF and cohesin occupancy and subsequent POL II recruitment to the IEG proximal-promoter sites during the paused state. In particular, establishment of a poised IEG chromatin environment relies on co-regulatory function of NUP153 and CTCF, which underlies efficient and timely IEG transcription at the NPC. Our results uncover a key role for the mammalian NPC in distribution of chromatin architectural proteins and demonstrate that NUP153 acts as a cis-acting factor that causally links the NPC to chromatin organization during transcription regulation.
Project description:Through RNA interference and genome-wide Nup153 binding studies, we found that Nup153 and Sox2 bind and co-regulate hundreds of genes. Furthermore, we found that Nup153 exhibits binding location dependent spatially distinct transcriptional control by differentially regulating expression when bound to the promoter region or to the transcription end site (TES). These results establish Nup153 not only as a novel transcriptional co-regulator of Sox2 but also as a key player in the regulation of cell fate by directly modulating gene expression.
Project description:RNA-binding protein (RBP) is a key player in regulating gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. CLIP-Seq, with the ability to provide a genome-wide map of protein-RNA interactions, has been increasingly used to decipher RBP-mediated posttranscriptional regulation. Generating highly reliable binding sites from CLIP-Seq requires not only stringent library preparation but also considerable computational efforts. Here we presented a first systematic evaluation of major computational steps for identifying RBP binding sites from CLIP-Seq data, including preprocessing, the choice of control samples, peak normalization, and motif discovery. We found that avoiding PCR amplification artifacts, normalizing to input RNA or mRNAseq, and defining the background model from control samples can reduce the bias introduced by RNA abundance and improve the quality of detected binding sites. Our findings can serve as a general guideline for CLIP experiments design and the comprehensive analysis of CLIP-Seq data.