Tissue-Specific Differences in Human Transfer RNA Expression
By K. Dittmar, J. Goodenbour, T. Pan. PLoS Genetics, 2006
604 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over 450 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes have been annotated in the human genome. Reliable quantitation of tRNA levels in human samples using microarray methods presents a technical challenge. We have developed a microarray method to quantify tRNAs based on a fluorescent dye-labeling technique. The first-generation tRNA microarray consists of 42 probes for nuclear encoded tRNAs and 21 probes for mitochondrial encoded tRNAs. These probes cover tRNAs for all 20 amino acids and 11 isoacceptor families. Using this array, we report that the amounts of tRNA within the total cellular RNA vary widely among eight different human tissues. The brain expresses higher overall levels of nuclear encoded tRNAs than every tissue examined but one and higher levels of mitochondrial encoded tRNAs than every tissue examined. We found tissue-specific differences in the expression of individual tRNA species, and tRNAs decoding amino acids with similar chemical properties exhibited coordinated expression in distinct tissue types. Relative tRNA abundance exhibits a statistically significant correlation to the codon usage of a collection of highly expressed, tissue-specific genes in a subset of tissues or tRNA isoacceptors. Our findings demonstrate the existence of tissue-specific expression of tRNA species that strongly implicates a role for tRNA heterogeneity in regulating translation and possibly additional processes in vertebrate organisms.
Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a67e83813c3f0de6553139eb16e11967c193b1f
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Citations in the corpus
- An evolutionarily conserved mechanism for controlling the efficiency of protein translation. (2010, methodology): “…(see Extended Experimental Procedures 1 and 2, Table S1, and Man and Pilpel, 2007; Percudani et al., 1997; Tuller et al., 2007), we examined it in S. cerevisiae using a microarray dedicated to the tRNAs in this species (Dittmar et al., 2004, 2006; Pavon-Eternod et al., 2009; Zaborske et al., 2009).”
- Pol III binding in six mammalian genomes shows high conservation among amino acid isotypes, despite divergence in tRNA gene usage (2011, neutral): “There are large differences in pol III binding between different human cultured cell types 8,11 and between different human tissues in tRNA expression 25 .”
- Codon Bias as a Means to Fine-Tune Gene Expression (2015, background): “This abundance could be statistically correlated to codon usage of highly expressed genes specific for those tissues (Dittmar et al., 2006).”
- Mistranslation-induced protein misfolding as a dominant constraint on coding-sequence evolution (2008, neutral): “Codon bias measured by Fop correlates with tissue expression similarly to dN, dS, and ts/tv ratio in fly, but not in mouse or human (not shown), likely because of tissue-specific codon usage (Dittmar et al., 2006).”