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Review
. 2014;11(9):1099-104.
doi: 10.4161/rna.36243.

Small RNAs meet their targets: when methylation defends miRNAs from uridylation

Guodong Ren  1 , Xuemei Chen, Bin Yu
Affiliations
Review

Small RNAs meet their targets: when methylation defends miRNAs from uridylation

Guodong Ren et al. RNA Biol. 2014.

Abstract

Small RNAs are incorporated into Argonaute protein-containing complexes to guide the silencing of target RNAs in both animals and plants. The abundance of endogenous small RNAs is precisely controlled at multiple levels including transcription, processing and Argonaute loading. In addition to these processes, 3' end modification of small RNAs, the topic of a research area that has rapidly evolved over the last several years, adds another layer of regulation of their abundance, diversity and function. Here, we review our recent understanding of small RNA 3' end methylation and tailing.

Keywords: argonaute; methylation; small RNA; uridylation.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
A phylogenetic tree of selected non-canonical poly(A) polymerases. Full-length proteins were downloaded from the Genbank database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank). A neighbor joining phylogenetic tree was constructed using MEGA 5.1 52 and displayed using Geneious v7.1.5 (http://www.geneious.com/). Hs: Homo sapien; Ce: Caenorhabditis elegans; Dm: Drosophila melanogaster; At: Arabidopsis thaliana; Sp: Schizosaccharomyces pombe; Cr: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; Sc: Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
A proposed model for target cleavage mediated small RNA destabilization. In this model, small RNA mediated target cleavage (A and B) but not translational inhibition (C) may provide a signal in the recruitment both tailing and trimming enzymes to AGO for the modification and further degradation of 5′ cleavage products. (A) HEN1 mediated 2′-O-methylation protects small RNAs from both tailing and trimming activities. (B) In the absence of HEN1, small RNAs become frequently tailed and trimmed. (C) In the case of partially complementary target RNA (e.g. animal miRNAs), small RNAs predominantly suppresses gene expression via translational inhibition. In this scenario, tailing and trimming enzymes will be barely recruited to AGO and small RNAs are less tailed and trimmed, regardless of methylated or not. Green oval, AGO protein; Blue oval, translational machinery.
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