New ways to meet your (3′) end—oligouridylation as a step on the path to destruction
- Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Messenger RNA degradation is a vital contributor to the control of gene expression that generally involves removal of a poly(A) tail in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In a thought-provoking study in this issue of Genes & Development, Mullen and Marzluff (2008) present data supporting a novel mechanism of mRNA decay. They discovered that histone mRNAs, which are unique in that they are never polyadenylated in mammalian cells, degrade by a cell cycle-regulated mechanism that involves addition of a short oligo(U) tail at the 3′ end. Interestingly, this oligo(U) tract is recognized by the Lsm1–7 complex, which then appears to feed the transcript into the standard mRNA decay pathways. These findings are exciting because they invoke parallels with prokaryotic mRNA decay, which requires polyadenylation immediately prior to degradation and involves an Lsm homolog, Hfq. Moreover, recent studies have identified other oligouridylated RNAs and several poly(U) polymerases, implying that this may be a more widespread mechanism for turnover of RNA.
Messenger RNAs in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes have an interesting problem in that they need to be resistant to decay to be translated but must eventually undergo degradation to allow appropriate regulation of gene expression. At first glance, it appears that these two kingdoms have developed opposite solutions to the problem; in bacteria, polyadenylation induces decay, whereas in eukaryotic cells a poly(A) tail protects the transcript from nucleases, and its removal is the first step in degradation (Dreyfus and Regnier 2002; Edmonds 2002). However, a closer look reveals that a poly(A) tail, through its lack of structure, serves as a primer for decay in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The poly(A) tail simply has acquired additional roles in eukaryotic cells.
Polyadenylation essentially creates an ssRNA-binding platform at the 3′ end of RNAs in order to initiate decay. Results described below indicate …
