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RNA interference (RNAi) is a post-transcriptional silencing process, triggered by double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), leading to the destabilization of homologous mRNAs. A distinction has been made between endogenous RNAi-related pathways and the exogenous RNAi pathway, the latter being essential for the experimental use of RNAi. Previous studies have shown that, in Caenorhabditis elegans, a complex containing the enzymes Dicer and the Argonaute RDE-1 process dsRNA. Dicer is responsible for cleaving dsRNA into short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) while RDE-1 acts as the siRNA acceptor. RDE-1 then guides a multi-protein complex to homologous targets to trigger mRNA destabilization. However, endogenous role(s) for RDE-1, if any, have remained unexplored. We here show that RDE-1 functions as a scavenger protein, taking up small RNA molecules from many different sources, including the microRNA (miRNA) pathway. This is in striking contrast to Argonaute proteins functioning directly in the miRNA pathway, ALG-1 and ALG-2: these proteins exclusively bind miRNAs. While playing no significant role in the biogenesis of the main pool of miRNAs, RDE-1 binds endogenous miRNAs and triggers RdRP activity on at least one perfectly matching, endogenous miRNA target. The resulting secondary siRNAs are taken up by a set of Argonaute proteins known to act as siRNA acceptors in exogenous RNAi, resulting in strong mRNA destabilization. Our results show that RDE-1 in an endogenous setting is actively screening the transcriptome using many different small RNAs, including miRNAs, as a guide, with implications for the evolution of transcripts with a potential to be recognized by Dicer.
Pubmed ID: 20386745 RIS Download
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An integrative platform for the analysis of transcriptomics, proteomics and genomic data with advanced functional profiling. Version 4 of Babelomics integrates primary (normalization, calls, etc.) and secondary (signatures, predictors, associations, TDTs, clustering, etc.) analysis tools within an environment that allows relating genomic data and/or interpreting them by means of different functional enrichment or gene set methods. Such interpretation is made not only using functional definitions (GO, KEGG, Biocarta, etc.) but also regulatory information (from Transfac, Jaspar, etc.) and other levels of regulation such as miRNA-mediated interference, protein-protein interactions, text-mining module definitions and the possibility of producing de novo annotations through the Blast2GO system . Babelomics has been extensively re-engineered and now it includes the use of web services and Web 2.0 technology features, a new user interface with persistent sessions and a new extended database of gene identifiers. In this release GEPAS and Babelomics have integrated into a unique web application with many new features and improvements: * Data input: import and quality control for the most common microarray formats * Normalization and base calling: for the most common expression, tiling and SNP microarrays (Affymetrix and Agilent). * Transcriptomics: diverse analysis options that include well established as well as novel algorithms for normalization, gene selection, class prediction, clustering and time-series analysis. * Genotyping: stratification analysis, association, TDT. * Functional profiling: functional enrichment and gene set enrichment analysis with functional terms (GO, KEGG, Biocarta, etc.), regulatory (Transfac, Jaspar, miRNAs, etc.), text-mining, derived bioentities, protein-protein interaction analysis. * Integrative analysis: Different variables can be related to each other (e.g. gene expression to gnomic copy number) and the results subjected to functional analysis. Platform: Online tool
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