Distinct mechanisms of microRNA sorting into cancer cell-derived extracellular vesicle subtypes
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- University of Texas at Austin, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Abstract
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) encompass a variety of vesicles secreted into the extracellular space. EVs have been implicated in promoting tumor metastasis, but the molecular composition of tumor-derived EV sub-types and the mechanisms by which molecules are sorted into EVs remain mostly unknown. We report the separation of two small EV sub-populations from a metastatic breast cancer cell line, with biochemical features consistent with different sub-cellular origins. These EV sub-types use different mechanisms of miRNA sorting (selective and non-selective), suggesting that sorting occurs via fundamentally distinct processes, possibly dependent on EV origin. Using biochemical and genetic tools, we identified the Lupus La protein as mediating sorting of selectively packaged miRNAs. We found that two motifs embedded in miR-122 are responsible for high-affinity binding to Lupus La and sorting into vesicles formed in a cell-free reaction. Thus, tumor cells can simultaneously deploy multiple EV species using distinct sorting mechanisms that may enable diverse functions in normal and cancer biology.
Data availability
RNA sequencing data have been deposited in SRA under accession code PRJNA532890.
Article and author information
Author details
Morayma M Temoche-Diaz
Matthew J Shurtleff
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Randy Schekman
National Institutes of Health (R01 GM37949)
- Alan M Lambowitz
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Suzanne R Pfeffer, Stanford University School of Medicine, United States
Version history
- Received: April 9, 2019
- Accepted: August 21, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 22, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 5, 2019 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: October 14, 2019 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2019, Temoche-Diaz 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
-
- 5,597
- views
-
- 1,036
- downloads
-
- 163
- 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)
Distinct mechanisms of microRNA sorting into cancer cell-derived extracellular vesicle subtypes
eLife 8:e47544.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47544
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
PIP3-dependent Rac exchanger 1 (P-Rex1) is abundantly expressed in neutrophils and plays central roles in chemotaxis and cancer metastasis by serving as a guanine-nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) for Rac. The enzyme is synergistically activated by PIP3 and heterotrimeric Gβγ subunits, but mechanistic details remain poorly understood. While investigating the regulation of P-Rex1 by PIP3, we discovered that Ins(1,3,4,5)P4 (IP4) inhibits P-Rex1 activity and induces large decreases in backbone dynamics in diverse regions of the protein. Cryo-electron microscopy analysis of the P-Rex1·IP4 complex revealed a conformation wherein the pleckstrin homology (PH) domain occludes the active site of the Dbl homology (DH) domain. This configuration is stabilized by interactions between the first DEP domain (DEP1) and the DH domain and between the PH domain and a 4-helix bundle (4HB) subdomain that extends from the C-terminal domain of P-Rex1. Disruption of the DH–DEP1 interface in a DH/PH-DEP1 fragment enhanced activity and led to a more extended conformation in solution, whereas mutations that constrain the occluded conformation led to decreased GEF activity. Variants of full-length P-Rex1 in which the DH–DEP1 and PH–4HB interfaces were disturbed exhibited enhanced activity during chemokine-induced cell migration, confirming that the observed structure represents the autoinhibited state in living cells. Interactions with PIP3-containing liposomes led to disruption of these interfaces and increased dynamics protein-wide. Our results further suggest that inositol phosphates such as IP4 help to inhibit basal P-Rex1 activity in neutrophils, similar to their inhibitory effects on phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase.
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
Current methods to quantify the fraction of aminoacylated tRNAs, also known as the tRNA charge, are limited by issues with either low throughput, precision, and/or accuracy. Here, we present an optimized charge transfer RNA sequencing (tRNA-Seq) method that combines previous developments with newly described approaches to establish a protocol for precise and accurate tRNA charge measurements. We verify that this protocol provides robust quantification of tRNA aminoacylation and we provide an end-to-end method that scales to hundreds of samples including software for data processing. Additionally, we show that this method supports measurements of relative tRNA expression levels and can be used to infer tRNA modifications through reverse transcription misincorporations, thereby supporting multipurpose applications in tRNA biology.
