In a new report in the journal The Plant Cell, University of Pennsylvania biologists used material from both humans and plants to examine chemical modifications to messenger RNA, or mRNA, finding that the modifications appear to play a significant role in the process by which mRNAs either survive and become translated into protein or are targeted for degradation.
The research was led by Brian D. Gregory, an assistant professor in Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Lee E. Vandivier, a graduate student in Gregory's lab. Coauthors include Rafael Campos and Ian M. Silverman from the Gregory lab, and Pavel P. Kuksa and Li-San Wang from Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.
Using the HAMR technique, the team investigated the epitranscriptome of two human cells lines as well as of immature flower buds from Arabidopsis thaliana, the quintessential plant model organism. They looked specifically for modifications that change the Watson-Crick base pairing edge, or the edge responsible for mRNA's ability to base pair.
"We saw a lot of enrichment in this subset for genes that are involved in stress response as well as cell cycle control and apoptosis," said Vandivier, a suggestion that the modifications, in both humans and plants, are linked to genes that must be tightly regulated and able to be marked for degradation when appropriate.
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.