Short intronic repeat sequences facilitate circular RNA production

By Dongming Liang, J. Wilusz. Genes & Development, 2014

877 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent deep sequencing studies have revealed thousands of circular noncoding RNAs generated from protein-coding genes. The mechanism by which the spliceosome selects only certain exons to circularize is largely unknown. Liang and Wilusz used extensive mutagenesis of expression plasmids to show that miniature introns containing the splice sites along with short (∼30- to 40-nt) inverted repeats are sufficient to allow the intervening exons to circularize in cells. The intronic repeats and exonic sequences must collaborate with one another, and a functional 3′ end processing signal is required, suggesting that circularization may occur post-transcriptionally.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d912982f80f226d650013dc54d89b0baa85f05fa

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In Molecular Biology

1. Julia Salzman
2. Ling-Ling Chen
3. Linda Szabo
4. Xiao-Ou Zhang
5. Yang Zhang
6. Feizhe Xiao
7. Nu Zhang
8. Kun Zhao

Citations in the corpus

• Recent advances in RNA structurome (2022, background): “Intronic Alu elements or proteinmediated long-range looping dynamically modulates the ratio of canonical to back splicing, resulting in the generation of large amounts of circular RNAs (Figure 7D) (Conn et al., 2015; Ivanov et al., 2015; Liang and Wilusz, 2014; Zhang et al., 2014).”
• Circular RNAs are long-lived and display only minimal early alterations in response to a growth factor (2015, background): “For example, it was shown that the levels of circular and linear isoforms of the ZKSCAN1 transcript in different tissues are largely independent of each other (61).”
• Diverse alternative back-splicing and alternative splicing landscape of circular RNAs (2016, background): “…that both cis-elements and trans-factors can facilitate back-splicing, presumably by bridging two back-splice sites close together to overcome the unfavorable catalysis by the spliceosome (Ashwal-Fluss et al. 2014; Liang and Wilusz 2014; Zhang et al. 2014; Chen and Yang 2015; Conn et al. 2015).”
• Detecting circular RNAs: bioinformatic and experimental challenges (2016, background): “Although not essential, long flanking introns that contain inverted repeat sequences seem to promote exon circularization 3,4,9,10 .”
• Statistically based splicing detection reveals neural enrichment and tissue-specific induction of circular RNA during human fetal development (2015, background): “Such an ascertainment bias might negatively impact results from genome-wide approaches to test the hypothesis that circular RNAs containing a single exon tend to be longer than other circularized exons and are therefore more efficiently circularized, as was suggested in [9].”