Evolutionary dynamics of circular RNAs in primates
- Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Australia
- UNSW Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Many primate genes produce circular RNAs (circRNAs). However, the extent of circRNA conservation between closely related species remains unclear. By comparing tissue-specific transcriptomes across over 70 million years of primate evolution, we identify that within 3 million years circRNA expression profiles diverged such that they are more related to species identity than organ type. However, our analysis also revealed a subset of circRNAs with conserved neural expression across tens of millions of years of evolution. By comparing to species-specific circRNAs, we identified that the downstream intron of the conserved circRNAs display a dramatic lengthening during evolution due to the insertion of novel retrotransposons. Our work provides comparative analyses of the mechanisms promoting circRNAs to generate increased transcriptomic complexity in primates.
Data availability
All datasets used in this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Analyzed data is also included in supporting material as well.
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The Landscape of Circular RNA Expression in the Human BrainBiological Psychiatry Journal https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.07.029.
Article and author information
Author details
Gabriela Santos-Rodriguez
Robert James Weatheritt
Funding
Australian Research Council
- Irina Voineagu
- Robert James Weatheritt
Cancer Institute of NSW
- Robert James Weatheritt
UNSW UIPA PhD Scholarship
- Gabriela Santos-Rodriguez
University of New South Wales Scientia Fellowship
- Irina Voineagu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Santos-Rodriguez 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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Evolutionary dynamics of circular RNAs in primates
eLife 10:e69148.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69148
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