Evolutionary dynamics of circular RNAs in primates

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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.

The following previously published data sets were used

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Article and author information

Author details

Gabriela Santos-Rodriguez

Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9076-0294
Irina Voineagu

UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Robert James Weatheritt

Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, Australia

For correspondence
r.weatheritt@garvan.org.au

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3716-1783

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

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.