AsianScientist (May 26, 2016) – Researchers in Singapore have developed a new high throughput method that identifies how ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules come together in an unbiased and large-scale manner inside cells.
Named Sequencing of Psoralen Linked And Selected Hybrids, or SPLASH, this newly-developed technique was used to describe the RNA network in human and yeast cells, its dynamics, and how the structural organization impacts translation and decay processes in the cell.
The development was jointly led by Drs Wan Yue and Niranjan Nagarajan from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s Genome Institute of Singapore and published in Molecular Cell.
RNAs are key molecules that play important roles in regulating gene expression in a cell. While the scientific community has extensively studied how mini cellular machines such as proteins and chromatin fold and interact with each other over the past decades, lesser is known about how RNA come together to interact with itself or with other RNA molecules.
This limitation prompted the team to come up with SPLASH to advance understanding of RNA interactions.
“The cell is a complex machine; we need to understand the configuration of all its components to be able to engineer and/or repair it. RNA shapes and RNA interaction networks are key to cellular function,” said Wan, co-lead author of the study. said,
“Depending on cellular needs, these dynamic interaction networks can be remodeled. Most importantly, targeting these networks could be a means to inhibit infectious organisms.”
The method will allow the team to study the transcriptomes of infectious organisms—including pathogenic bacteria, dengue and Zika viruses—to understand the way RNA shapes and networks in these genomes enable the infection of human cells by pathogens. The transcriptome is the set of all RNA molecules in one cell or a population of cells.
It is hoped that these efforts in understanding microbial pathogenicity will contribute to new anti-microbials, anti-virals or vaccines against these pathogens.
“It is exciting to have a first comprehensive view of the RNA interactome and to capture its dynamics. We now have the tools to understand how RNA structural organization impacts disease and pathogen biology, with the eventual goal being to leverage this understanding for new drugs and antimicrobials,” said Nagarajan, the paper’s co-lead author.
The article can be found at: Aw et al. (2016) In Vivo Mapping of Eukaryotic RNA Interactomes Reveals Principles of Higher-Order Organization and Regulation.
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Source: A*STAR; Photo: Shutterstock.
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