RNA polymerase errors cause splicing defects and can be regulated by differential expression of RNA polymerase subunits

  1. Lucas B Carey  Is a corresponding author
  1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Abstract

Errors during transcription may play an important role in determining cellular phenotypes: the RNA polymerase error rate is >4 orders of magnitude higher than that of DNA polymerase and errors are amplified >1000-fold due to translation. However, current methods to measure RNA polymerase fidelity are low-throughout, technically challenging, and organism specific. Here I show that changes in RNA polymerase fidelity can be measured using standard RNA sequencing protocols. I find that RNA polymerase is error-prone, and these errors can result in splicing defects. Furthermore, I find that differential expression of RNA polymerase subunits causes changes in RNA polymerase fidelity, and that coding sequences may have evolved to minimize the effect of these errors. These results suggest that errors caused by RNA polymerase may be a major source of stochastic variability at the level of single cells.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Lucas B Carey

    Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
    For correspondence
    lucas.carey@upf.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Patrick Cramer, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany

Version history

  1. Received: July 8, 2015
  2. Accepted: October 26, 2015
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: December 10, 2015 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: December 29, 2015 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2015, Carey

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 10,407
    views
  • 498
    downloads
  • 40
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Lucas B Carey
(2015)
RNA polymerase errors cause splicing defects and can be regulated by differential expression of RNA polymerase subunits
eLife 4:e09945.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09945

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09945

Further reading

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Developmental Biology
    Gang Xue, Xiaoyi Zhang ... Zhiyuan Li
    Research Article

    Organisms utilize gene regulatory networks (GRN) to make fate decisions, but the regulatory mechanisms of transcription factors (TF) in GRNs are exceedingly intricate. A longstanding question in this field is how these tangled interactions synergistically contribute to decision-making procedures. To comprehensively understand the role of regulatory logic in cell fate decisions, we constructed a logic-incorporated GRN model and examined its behavior under two distinct driving forces (noise-driven and signal-driven). Under the noise-driven mode, we distilled the relationship among fate bias, regulatory logic, and noise profile. Under the signal-driven mode, we bridged regulatory logic and progression-accuracy trade-off, and uncovered distinctive trajectories of reprogramming influenced by logic motifs. In differentiation, we characterized a special logic-dependent priming stage by the solution landscape. Finally, we applied our findings to decipher three biological instances: hematopoiesis, embryogenesis, and trans-differentiation. Orthogonal to the classical analysis of expression profile, we harnessed noise patterns to construct the GRN corresponding to fate transition. Our work presents a generalizable framework for top-down fate-decision studies and a practical approach to the taxonomy of cell fate decisions.

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Genetics and Genomics
    Weichen Song, Yongyong Shi, Guan Ning Lin
    Tools and Resources

    We propose a new framework for human genetic association studies: at each locus, a deep learning model (in this study, Sei) is used to calculate the functional genomic activity score for two haplotypes per individual. This score, defined as the Haplotype Function Score (HFS), replaces the original genotype in association studies. Applying the HFS framework to 14 complex traits in the UK Biobank, we identified 3619 independent HFS–trait associations with a significance of p < 5 × 10−8. Fine-mapping revealed 2699 causal associations, corresponding to a median increase of 63 causal findings per trait compared with single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based analysis. HFS-based enrichment analysis uncovered 727 pathway–trait associations and 153 tissue–trait associations with strong biological interpretability, including ‘circadian pathway-chronotype’ and ‘arachidonic acid-intelligence’. Lastly, we applied least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression to integrate HFS prediction score with SNP-based polygenic risk scores, which showed an improvement of 16.1–39.8% in cross-ancestry polygenic prediction. We concluded that HFS is a promising strategy for understanding the genetic basis of human complex traits.