A single H/ACA small nucleolar RNA mediates tumor suppression downstream of oncogenic RAS
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Weill Cornell Medicine, United States
- Gladstone Institutes, United States
- Michigan State University, United States
- Arbele Corporation, United States
Abstract
Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are a diverse group of non-coding RNAs that direct chemical modifications at specific residues on other RNA molecules, primarily on ribosomal RNA (rRNA). SnoRNAs are altered in several cancers; however, their role in cell homeostasis as well as in cellular transformation remains poorly explored. Here, we show that specific subsets of snoRNAs are differentially regulated during the earliest cellular response to oncogenic RASG12V expression. We describe a novel function for one H/ACA snoRNA, SNORA24, which guides two pseudouridine modifications within the small ribosomal subunit, in RAS-induced senescence in vivo. We find that in mouse models, loss of Snora24 cooperates with RASG12V to promote the development of liver cancer that closely resembles human steatohepatitic hepatocellular carcinoma. From a clinical perspective, we further show that human hepatocellular carcinomas with low SNORA24 expression display increased lipid content and are associated with poor patient survival. We next asked whether ribosomes lacking SNORA24-guided pseudouridine modifications on 18S rRNA have alterations in their biophysical properties. Single-molecule Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) analyses revealed that these ribosomes exhibit perturbations in aminoacyl-transfer RNA (aa-tRNA) selection and altered pre-translocation ribosome complex dynamics. Furthermore, we find that HCC cells lacking SNORA24-guided pseudouridine modifications have increased translational miscoding and stop codon readthrough frequencies. These findings highlight a role for specific snoRNAs in safeguarding against oncogenic insult and demonstrate a functional link between H/ACA snoRNAs regulated by RAS and the biophysical properties of ribosomes in cancer.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figure 1 and Figure 1-figure supplement 2.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R35 CA242986)
- Davide Ruggero
National Institutes of Health (R01 GM079238-13)
- Scott C Blanchard
National Institutes of Health (R21 TR001743)
- Bin Chen
National Institutes of Health (K01 ES028047)
- Bin Chen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) protocols (AN151649) of the University of California, San Francisco, with assistance from the Laboratory Animal Resource Center (LARC).
Human subjects: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Written informed consent was obtained from every patient. Liver tissue specimens were obtained from patients undergoing treatment for HCC at UCSF.
Copyright
© 2019, McMahon 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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A single H/ACA small nucleolar RNA mediates tumor suppression downstream of oncogenic RAS
eLife 8:e48847.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48847
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