Circular RNA Is Expressed across the Eukaryotic Tree of Life

By Peter L Wang, Yun Bao, M. Yee, Steven P. Barrett, G. Hogan, M. Olsen, J. Dinneny, Patrick O. Brown, Julia Salzman. PLoS ONE, 2014

680 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An unexpectedly large fraction of genes in metazoans (human, mouse, zebrafish, worm, fruit fly) express high levels of circularized RNAs containing canonical exons. Here we report that circular RNA isoforms are found in diverse species whose most recent common ancestor existed more than one billion years ago: fungi (Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae), a plant (Arabidopsis thaliana), and protists (Plasmodium falciparum and Dictyostelium discoideum). For all species studied to date, including those in this report, only a small fraction of the theoretically possible circular RNA isoforms from a given gene are actually observed. Unlike metazoans, Arabidopsis, D. discoideum, P. falciparum, S. cerevisiae, and S. pombe have very short introns (∼100 nucleotides or shorter), yet they still produce circular RNAs. A minority of genes in S. pombe and P. falciparum have documented examples of canonical alternative splicing, making it unlikely that all circular RNAs are by-products of alternative splicing or ‘piggyback’ on signals used in alternative RNA processing. In S. pombe, the relative abundance of circular to linear transcript isoforms changed in a gene-specific pattern during nitrogen starvation. Circular RNA may be an ancient, conserved feature of eukaryotic gene expression programs.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/159a97ece81653c973ac311d1a7e2f3b58298814

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Citations in the corpus

Foxo3 circular RNA retards cell cycle progression via forming ternary complexes with p21 and CDK2 (2016, background): “It has been proposed that circular RNAs are conserved across species (28,29).”
Circular RNA Expression: Its Potential Regulation and Function (2016, background): “falciparum [6], where, if functional, circRNA must [5_TD$DIFF]operate through other pathways.”
Statistically based splicing detection reveals neural enrichment and tissue-specific induction of circular RNA during human fetal development (2015, methodology): “Testing the extent of evolutionary conservation between circular RNA production in orthologous genes has the potential to uncover mechanisms underlying circular RNA biogenesis and to infer function of these molecules [1, 3, 4, 6, 22].”
Detecting circular RNAs: bioinformatic and experimental challenges (2016, background): “This was later confirmed in worms and flies by several groups 6,7,11,25 , and subsequently extended to a much more divergent group of eukaryotes, including yeast, plants and parasites, the last common ancestor of which existed more than a billion years ago 30 .”
CircNet: a database of circular RNAs derived from transcriptome sequencing data (2015, background): “tion of circRNAs in mouse (17), fly (18) and other animals (19) suggests that circRNA ubiquity is evolutionallyconserved.”
Circular RNAs: analysis, expression and potential functions (2016, background): “falciparum, also supports additional functions for circRNA aside from a function as a miRNA sponge (Wang et al., 2014).”
Efficient backsplicing produces translatable circular mRNAs (2015, background): “It has been reported that circRNAs are conserved across the eukaryotic tree, suggesting circRNAs may play important biological roles across multiple species (Wang et al. 2014a).”
The RNA binding protein quaking regulates formation of circRNAs. (2015, neutral): “However, the advent of next generation sequencing has illuminated circRNAs as an entire class of abundant, non-coding RNAs ubiquitous among eukaryotes (Guo et al., 2014; Jeck and Sharpless, 2014; Jeck et al., 2013; Lasda and Parker, 2014; Memczak et al., 2013; Salzman et al., 2012, 2013; Wang et al.”
Past, present, and future of circRNAs (2019, neutral): “Evolutionary conservation of circRNAs circRNAs are present in most organisms, including Archaea, plants, yeast, and most metazoans (Danan et al , 2012; Wang et al , 2014; Broadbent et al , 2015; Lu et al , 2015; Sun et al , 2016; Ji et al , 2019).”
Circular RNAs: diversity of form and function (2014, background): “Additionally, circRNAs have been recently reported in plants (Arabidopsis thaliana), yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and protists (Plasmodium falciparum and Dictyostelium discoideum) (Wang et al. 2014).”