RISC-Interacting Clearing 3’- 5’ Exoribonucleases (RICEs) degrade uridylated cleavage fragments to maintain functional RISC in Arabidopsis

  1. Zhonghui Zhang
  2. Fuqu Hu
  3. Min Woo Sung
  4. Chang Shu
  5. Claudia Castillo-González
  6. Hisashi Koiwa
  7. Guiliang Tang
  8. Marty Dickman
  9. Pingwei Li  Is a corresponding author
  10. Xiuren Zhang  Is a corresponding author
  1. Texas A&M University, United States
  2. Michigan Technological University, United States

Abstract

RNA-induced Silencing Complex (RISC) is composed of miRNAs and AGO proteins. AGOs use miRNAs as guides to slice target mRNAs to produce truncated 5' and 3' RNA fragments. The 5' cleaved RNA fragments are marked with uridylation for degradation. Here, we identified novel cofactors of Arabidopsis AGOs, named RICE1 and RICE2. RICE proteins specifically degraded single-strand (ss) RNAs in vitro; but neither miRNAs nor miRNA*s in vivo. RICE1 exhibited a DnaQ-like exonuclease fold and formed a homohexamer with the active sites located at the interfaces between RICE1 subunits. Notably, ectopic expression of catalytically-inactive RICE1 not only significantly reduced miRNA levels; but also increased 5' cleavage RISC fragments with extended uridine tails. We conclude that RICEs act to degrade uridylated 5’ products of AGO cleavage to maintain functional RISC. Our study also suggests a possible link between decay of cleaved target mRNAs and miRNA stability in RISC.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated
    1. Zhang Z
    2. Zhang X
    (2017) small RNAs in RICE mutants
    Publicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE96951).
    1. Min Woo Sung
    2. Pingwei Li
    3. and Xiuren Zhang
    (2017) protein structure of RICE1
    Publicly available at the RCSB Protein Data Bank (accession no. 5V5F).

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Zhonghui Zhang

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Fuqu Hu

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Min Woo Sung

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Chang Shu

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Claudia Castillo-González

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Hisashi Koiwa

    Department of Horticulture, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  7. Guiliang Tang

    Department of Biological Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  8. Marty Dickman

    Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6091-6921
  9. Pingwei Li

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    For correspondence
    pingwei@tamu.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  10. Xiuren Zhang

    Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States
    For correspondence
    xiuren.zhang@tamu.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8982-2999

Funding

National Science Foundation (CAREER MCB-1253369)

  • Xiuren Zhang

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RP160822)

  • Xiuren Zhang

The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.

Reviewing Editor

  1. David Baulcombe, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Version history

  1. Received: December 21, 2016
  2. Accepted: April 29, 2017
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: May 2, 2017 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: May 31, 2017 (version 2)
  5. Version of Record updated: June 5, 2017 (version 3)

Copyright

© 2017, Zhang et al.

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

  • 3,217
    views
  • 700
    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. Zhonghui Zhang
  2. Fuqu Hu
  3. Min Woo Sung
  4. Chang Shu
  5. Claudia Castillo-González
  6. Hisashi Koiwa
  7. Guiliang Tang
  8. Marty Dickman
  9. Pingwei Li
  10. Xiuren Zhang
(2017)
RISC-Interacting Clearing 3’- 5’ Exoribonucleases (RICEs) degrade uridylated cleavage fragments to maintain functional RISC in Arabidopsis
eLife 6:e24466.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24466

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24466

Further reading

    1. Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
    2. Cell Biology
    Natalia Dolgova, Eva-Maria E Uhlemann ... Oleg Y Dmitriev
    Research Article

    Mediator of ERBB2-driven Cell Motility 1 (MEMO1) is an evolutionary conserved protein implicated in many biological processes; however, its primary molecular function remains unknown. Importantly, MEMO1 is overexpressed in many types of cancer and was shown to modulate breast cancer metastasis through altered cell motility. To better understand the function of MEMO1 in cancer cells, we analyzed genetic interactions of MEMO1 using gene essentiality data from 1028 cancer cell lines and found multiple iron-related genes exhibiting genetic relationships with MEMO1. We experimentally confirmed several interactions between MEMO1 and iron-related proteins in living cells, most notably, transferrin receptor 2 (TFR2), mitoferrin-2 (SLC25A28), and the global iron response regulator IRP1 (ACO1). These interactions indicate that cells with high MEMO1 expression levels are hypersensitive to the disruptions in iron distribution. Our data also indicate that MEMO1 is involved in ferroptosis and is linked to iron supply to mitochondria. We have found that purified MEMO1 binds iron with high affinity under redox conditions mimicking intracellular environment and solved MEMO1 structures in complex with iron and copper. Our work reveals that the iron coordination mode in MEMO1 is very similar to that of iron-containing extradiol dioxygenases, which also display a similar structural fold. We conclude that MEMO1 is an iron-binding protein that modulates iron homeostasis in cancer cells.

    1. Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
    2. Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
    Isabelle Petit-Hartlein, Annelise Vermot ... Franck Fieschi
    Research Article

    NADPH oxidases (NOX) are transmembrane proteins, widely spread in eukaryotes and prokaryotes, that produce reactive oxygen species (ROS). Eukaryotes use the ROS products for innate immune defense and signaling in critical (patho)physiological processes. Despite the recent structures of human NOX isoforms, the activation of electron transfer remains incompletely understood. SpNOX, a homolog from Streptococcus pneumoniae, can serves as a robust model for exploring electron transfers in the NOX family thanks to its constitutive activity. Crystal structures of SpNOX full-length and dehydrogenase (DH) domain constructs are revealed here. The isolated DH domain acts as a flavin reductase, and both constructs use either NADPH or NADH as substrate. Our findings suggest that hydride transfer from NAD(P)H to FAD is the rate-limiting step in electron transfer. We identify significance of F397 in nicotinamide access to flavin isoalloxazine and confirm flavin binding contributions from both DH and Transmembrane (TM) domains. Comparison with related enzymes suggests that distal access to heme may influence the final electron acceptor, while the relative position of DH and TM does not necessarily correlate with activity, contrary to previous suggestions. It rather suggests requirement of an internal rearrangement, within the DH domain, to switch from a resting to an active state. Thus, SpNOX appears to be a good model of active NOX2, which allows us to propose an explanation for NOX2’s requirement for activation.