RISC-Interacting Clearing 3’- 5’ Exoribonucleases (RICEs) degrade uridylated cleavage fragments to maintain functional RISC in Arabidopsis
- Texas A&M University, United States
- Michigan Technological University, United States
- Cited 19
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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.
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Author details
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
- David Baulcombe, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Received: December 21, 2016
- Accepted: April 29, 2017
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 2, 2017 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: May 31, 2017 (version 2)
- 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.
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