Neural circular RNAs are derived from synaptic genes and regulated by development and plasticity

By X. You, Irena Vlatkovic, A. Babic, Tristan J. Will, Irina Epstein, Georgi Tushev, Güney Akbalik, Mantian Wang, Caspar Glock, C. Quedenau and 8 more. Nature Neuroscience, 2015

1,070 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have re-emerged as an interesting RNA species. Using deep RNA profiling in different mouse tissues, we observed that circRNAs were substantially enriched in brain and a disproportionate fraction of them were derived from host genes that encode synaptic proteins. Moreover, on the basis of separate profiling of the RNAs localized in neuronal cell bodies and neuropil, circRNAs were, on average, more enriched in the neuropil than their host gene mRNA isoforms. Using high-resolution in situ hybridization, we visualized circRNA punctae in the dendrites of neurons. Consistent with the idea that circRNAs might regulate synaptic function during development, many circRNAs changed their abundance abruptly at a time corresponding to synaptogenesis. In addition, following a homeostatic downscaling of neuronal activity many circRNAs exhibited substantial up- or downregulation. Together, our data indicate that brain circRNAs are positioned to respond to and regulate synaptic function.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71e94e086e1ff170b5f9ef72c76dfded4ed226da

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Citations in the corpus

Circular RNAs are long-lived and display only minimal early alterations in response to a growth factor (2015, background): “Thus, our study adds several hundreds of mammary circRNAs to the growing catalog of annotated circRNAs (8,12,13,15,16,28,47,56,57).”
The bioinformatics toolbox for circRNA discovery and analysis (2020, background): “CircRNAs are enriched in the brain in comparison to other tissues [30].”
Novel Role of FBXW7 Circular RNA in Repressing Glioma Tumorigenesis (2017, background): “CircRNAs are novel RNA molecules with different biological functions and pathological implications (10,37,38).”
CircRNA: functions and properties of a novel potential biomarker for cancer (2017, background): “Additionally, some researchers have found that circRNAs are abundant in eukaryotic cells, especially in mammalian brains [16], and some circRNAs are reported to be associated with human neurodegenerative diseases [17].”
A census of human RNA-binding proteins (2014, background): “I analyzed published adult mRNA-seq data from mouse testis and liver and assessed read abundances for the different isoforms (You et al., 2015) (Figure 3.”
Circular RNA and its mechanisms in disease: From the bench to the clinic. (2018, background): “circRNAs also accumulate in some physiological processes, such as neuronal differentiation, fetal development and synaptic development (RybakWolf et al., 2015; Szabo et al., 2015; Westholm et al., 2014; You et al., 2015), and this accumulation of circRNAs indicates that they might function in these ”
Circular RNAs: analysis, expression and potential functions (2016, background): “Despite the imperfections described above, exonuclease resistance along with quantitative measures of resistance to the nuclease (e.g. qRT-PCR or northern blot) provides compelling evidence for circularity.”