Title
The RNase PARN-1 Trims piRNA 3' Ends to Promote Transcriptome Surveillance in C. elegans
UMMS Affiliation
RNA Therapeutics Institute; Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology; Program in Molecular Medicine
Publication Date
2016-02-25
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology | Bioinformatics | Cell Biology | Computational Biology | Integrative Biology | Systems Biology
Abstract
Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) engage Piwi proteins to suppress transposons and are essential for fertility in diverse organisms. An interesting feature of piRNAs is that, while piRNA lengths are stereotypical within a species, they can differ widely between species. For example, piRNAs are mainly 29 and 30 nucleotides in humans, 24 to 30 nucleotides in D. melanogaster, and uniformly 21 nucleotides in C. elegans. However, how piRNA length is determined and whether length impacts function remains unknown. Here, we show that C. elegans deficient for PARN-1, a conserved RNase, accumulate untrimmed piRNAs with 3' extensions. Surprisingly, these longer piRNAs are stable and associate with the Piwi protein PRG-1 but fail to robustly recruit downstream silencing factors. Our findings identify PARN-1 as a key regulator of piRNA length in C. elegans and suggest that length is regulated to promote efficient transcriptome surveillance.
DOI of Published Version
10.1016/j.cell.2016.02.008
Source
Cell. 2016 Feb 25;164(5):974-84. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.02.008. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Cell
Related Resources
PubMed ID
26919432
Repository Citation
Tang W, Tu S, Lee H, Weng Z, Mello CC. (2016). The RNase PARN-1 Trims piRNA 3' Ends to Promote Transcriptome Surveillance in C. elegans. Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology Publications. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.02.008. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/bioinformatics_pubs/82