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Author Notes:
Corresponding authors: ywang94@emory.edu, yingxm@bmi.ac.cn.
J. Wang and Z. Li contributed equally to this work.
We thank Dr. Georgia Chen for the cell lines and Ms. Doreen Theune for editing this manuscript.
Subjects:
Research Funding:
X.Y. acknowledges support from the China National High Technology Research and Development Program (2014AA020604), and Y.W. acknowledges support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (CA186129, CA185882, and P30CA138292).
Keywords:
- Science & Technology
- Life Sciences & Biomedicine
- Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
- miRNA
- cis-antisense
- gene expression
- miR-3661
- PPP2CA
- human cells
- PROTEIN PHOSPHATASE 2A
- KINASE-B
- MICRORNAS
- IDENTIFICATION
- DEPHOSPHORYLATION
- AKT
- PHOSPHORYLATION
- BIOGENESIS
Systematic study of cis-antisense miRNAs in animal species reveals miR-3661 to target PPP2CA in human cells
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Abstract:
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) suppress targeting gene expression through blocking translation or triggering mRNA degradation and, in general, act in trans, through a partially complementary interaction with the 3' untranslated region (3' UTR) or coding regions of a target gene. Although it has been reported previously that some miRNAs suppress their target genes on the opposite strand with a fully complementary sequence (i.e., natural antisense miRNAs that act in cis), there is no report to systematically study such cis-antisense miRNAs in different animal species. Here we report that cis-antisense miRNAs do exist in different animal species: 48 in Caenorhabditis elegans, 17 in Drosophila, 36 in Mus musculus, and 52 in Homo sapiens using a systematical bioinformatics approach. We show that most of these cis-antisense miRNAs can efficiently reduce the expression levels of their target genes in human cells. We further investigate hsa-miR-3661, one of the predicted cis-antisense miRNAs, in detail and demonstrate that this miRNA directly targets the coding sequence of PPP2CA located on the opposite DNA strand and inhibits the PPP2CA expression. Taken together, these results indicate that cis-antisense miRNAs are conservative and functional in animal species including humans.
Copyright information:
© 2015 Wang et al.; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the RNA Society.
This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
