Chaulk Steven G, Fahlman Richard P
Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta, 474 Medical Sciences Building, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T6G 2H7.
Methods Mol Biol. 2014;1182:43-55. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-1062-5_5.
The understanding of RNA in regulating gene expression has exploded over the past 15 years. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have vastly expanded the role of RNA in gene regulation beyond spliceosomal, ribosomal, and messenger RNAs. Approximately one half of miRNAs are polycistronic, where two or more miRNAs are encoded on a single pri-miRNA transcript, termed a miRNA cluster. The six miRNAs of the miR-1792 cluster are contained within a ~800 nucleotide region within intron 3 of the cl13orf25 ~7 kb pri-miRNA transcript. We recently reported on the tertiary structured domain of miR-1792 and its role in modulating miRNA biogenesis. The key finding was that the cluster structure explained the differential processing of the miRNA hairpins by Drosha. This work demonstrated the need to consider pri-miRNA tertiary structure in miRNA biogenesis. Since biochemical structure probing is typically performed on relatively short RNAs (≤200 nucleotides), we had to adapt these methodologies for application on large RNAs (800 nucleotide miR-1792 pri-miRNA). We present here our adaptation of a protection footprinting method using ribonucleases to probe the structure of the 800 nucleotide miR-1792 pri-miRNA. We outline the technical difficulties involved in probing large RNAs and data visualization using denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and how we adapted the existing approaches to probe large RNAs. The methodology outlined here is generally applicable to large RNAs including long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA).
在过去的15年里,人们对RNA在基因表达调控中的理解有了极大的拓展。微小RNA(miRNA)极大地扩展了RNA在基因调控中的作用,其作用范围超出了剪接体RNA、核糖体RNA和信使RNA。大约一半的miRNA是多顺反子的,即在一个单一的初级miRNA转录本(称为miRNA簇)上编码两个或更多的miRNA。miR-1792簇的6个miRNA包含在cl13orf25约7 kb初级miRNA转录本第3内含子内一个约800个核苷酸的区域中。我们最近报道了miR-1792的三级结构域及其在调节miRNA生物合成中的作用。关键发现是,该簇结构解释了Drosha对miRNA发夹结构的差异加工。这项工作表明在miRNA生物合成中需要考虑初级miRNA的三级结构。由于生化结构探测通常是在相对较短的RNA(≤200个核苷酸)上进行的,我们不得不对这些方法进行调整,以应用于较大的RNA(约800个核苷酸的miR-1792初级miRNA)。我们在此展示了我们对一种保护足迹法的调整,该方法使用核糖核酸酶来探测约800个核苷酸的miR-1792初级miRNA的结构。我们概述了探测大RNA以及使用变性聚丙烯酰胺凝胶电泳进行数据可视化所涉及的技术难题,以及我们如何调整现有方法来探测大RNA。这里概述的方法通常适用于包括长链非编码RNA(lncRNA)在内的大RNA。