Project description:This experiment identifies hnRNP A1 binding sites transcriptome-wide in Hela cells. HeLa cells with inducible expression of T7-tagged hnRNP A1 were grown to approximately 90% confluence and then subject to iCLIP analysis (following the protocol from Huppertz et al. 2014 (iCLIP: protein-RNA interactions at nucleotide resolution)). The iCLIP library was sequenced using Illumina's HighSeq 1500
Project description:The studies of spliceosomal interactions are challenging due to their dynamic nature. Here we developed spliceosome iCLIP, which immunoprecipitates SmB along with snRNPs and auxiliary RNA binding proteins (RBPs) to simultaneously map the spliceosomal binding to human snRNAs and pre-mRNAs. This identified 9 distinct regions on pre-mRNAs, which overlap with position-dependent binding patterns of 15 RBPs. Using spliceosome iCLIP, we additionally identified >50,000 branchpoints (BPs) that have canonical features, unlike those identified by RNA-seq. The iCLIP BPs generally overlap with the computationally predicted BPs, and alternative BPs are associated with extended regions of structurally accessible RNA. We find that the position and strength of BPs defines the binding patterns of SF3 and U2AF complexes, whereas the RNA structure around BPs affects the sensitivity of exons to perturbation of these complexes. Our findings introduce spliceosome iCLIP as a new method for transcriptomic studies of BPs and splicing mechanisms.
