Molecular determinants and guided evolution of species-specific RNA editing

Robert A. Reenan ()
Additional contact information
Robert A. Reenan: University of Connecticut Health Center

Nature, 2005, vol. 434, issue 7031, 409-413

Abstract: Abstract Most RNA editing systems are mechanistically diverse, informationally restorative, and scattershot in eukaryotic lineages1. In contrast, genetic recoding by adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing seems common in animals; usually, altering highly conserved or invariant coding positions in proteins2,3,4. Here I report striking variation between species in the recoding of synaptotagmin I (sytI). Fruitflies, mosquitoes and butterflies possess shared and species-specific sytI editing sites, all within a single exon. Honeybees, beetles and roaches do not edit sytI. The editing machinery is usually directed to modify particular adenosines by information stored in intron-mediated RNA structures5,6,7. Combining comparative genomics of 34 species with mutational analysis reveals that complex, multi-domain, pre-mRNA structures solely determine species-appropriate RNA editing. One of these is a previously unreported long-range pseudoknot. I show that small changes to intronic sequences, far removed from an editing site, can transfer the species specificity of editing between RNA substrates. Taken together, these data support a phylogeny of sytI gene editing spanning more than 250 million years of hexapod evolution. The results also provide models for the genesis of RNA editing sites through the stepwise addition of structural domains, or by short walks through sequence space from ancestral structures.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03364 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:434:y:2005:i:7031:d:10.1038_nature03364

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature03364

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().