Identification and characterization of two novel classes of small RNAs in the mouse germline: retrotransposon-derived siRNAs in oocytes and germline small RNAs in testes.

By Toshiaki Watanabe, A. Takeda, Tomoyuki Tsukiyama, K. Mise, T. Okuno, Hiroyuki Sasaki, N. Minami, H. Imai. Genes & Development, 2006

613 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Small RNAs ranging in size between 18 and 30 nucleotides (nt) are found in many organisms including yeasts, plants, and animals. Small RNAs are involved in the regulation of gene expression through translational repression, mRNA degradation, and chromatin modification. In mammals, microRNAs (miRNAs) are the only small RNAs that have been well characterized. Here, we have identified two novel classes of small RNAs in the mouse germline. One class consists of approximately 20- to 24-nt small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) from mouse oocytes, which are derived from retroelements including LINE, SINE, and LTR retrotransposons. Addition of retrotransposon-derived sequences to the 3' untranslated region (UTR) of a reporter mRNA destabilizes the mRNA significantly when injected into full-grown oocytes. These results suggest that retrotransposons are suppressed through the RNAi pathway in mouse oocytes. The other novel class of small RNAs is 26- to 30-nt germline small RNAs (gsRNAs) from testes. gsRNAs are expressed during spermatogenesis in a developmentally regulated manner, are mapped to the genome in clusters, and have strong strand bias. These features are reminiscent of Tetrahymena approximately 23- to 24-nt small RNAs and Caenorhabditis elegans X-cluster small RNAs. A conserved novel small RNA pathway may be present in diverse animals.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98135d1ff282de6b98b102874d0aa43baad58a94

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cancer Research

In Molecular Biology

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Mouse ES cells express endogenous shRNAs, siRNAs, and other Microprocessor-independent, Dicer-dependent small RNAs. (2008, background): “They also have been observed in metazoa including Caenorhabditis elegans (Ambros et al. 2003), Drosophila melanogaster (Czech et al. 2008; Ghildiyal et al. 2008; Kawamura et al. 2008; Okamura et al. 2008), and mouse oocytes (Watanabe et al. 2006, 2008; Tam et al. 2008).”
The mammalian ovary from genesis to revelation. (2009, background): “(616) identified a novel class of oocyte-expressed small RNAs known as endogenous siRNAs.”
Distinguishing protein-coding and noncoding genes in the human genome (2007, result): “This is in contrast to piRNAs in adult testis of other mammals, which are depleted of repeat sequences and have no known function (Aravin et al. 2006; Girard et al. 2006; Grivna et al. 2006; Lau et al. 2006; Watanabe et al. 2006).”
piRNABank: a web resource on classified and clustered Piwi-interacting RNAs (2007, background): “Since piRNAs have been reported to exist as clusters (4–8), cluster information is very important for researchers.”
Epigenetic events in mammalian germ-cell development: reprogramming and beyond (2008, background): “In addition to DNA methylation, oocytes also use small-RNA pathways to silence retrotransposons (Ref”
A role for Piwi and piRNAs in germ cell maintenance and transposon silencing in Zebrafish. (2007, background): “However, some retrotransposon-derived small RNAs have been isolated from mouse oocytes (Watanabe et al., 2006), and Carmell et al. (2007) show that mutations in MIWI2 lead to activation of transposons, indicating that an RNA-based germline defense mechanism may be a more general phenomenon in…”
Deep sequencing of RNA from immune cell-derived vesicles uncovers the selective incorporation of small non-coding RNA biotypes with potential regulatory functions (2012, background): “Shuttle RNA contained relatively large numbers of Long Interspersed Elements (LINEs), Long Terminal Repeats (LTRs) and simple repeat sequences, whereas the majority of repeat sequences in the cellular RNA consisted of tRNAs (Figure 4A).”